Although Eudora Welty has considered herself primarily a short-story writer, and although her earliest critical acclaim resulted from her brilliant experiments with form in that genre, it was not until the publication of her novel Losing Battles (1970) that reviewers began to speak of her as a novelist of major rank. U.S. News & World Report (15 February 1993) noted that when The Optimist's Daughter was published in 1972, Welty's "place in the pantheon [of American letters was] ... formally ratified."

Among Welty's many awards are the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for the novel The Optimist's Daughter; several O. Henry prizes for short stories; the William Dean Howells Medal, for the novella The Ponder Heart (1954); the Gold Medal for Fiction, given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, for her entire body of fiction; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the P.E.N./ Malamud Award for excellence in the short story; and...