In 1983 she was named Woman of the Year in Mississippi. In 1987 the French consul general traveled to her hometown, Jackson, Mississippi, to dub her a knight of France -- Chevalier de L'Ordre d'Arts et Lettres -- one of France's highest civilian awards. "It's not like anything I could have ever imagined," Welty commented on the honor, "to be a knight, or a knightess"; in 1996 she received the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur from France.
When Welty was awarded the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award (including twenty thousand dollars and an engraved crystal book) by the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Library Trust in 1991, the program for the black-tie dinner presented her as "our national treasure." The event was sold out two weeks in advance to 450 guests at eighty-five dollars a plate, and the following morning Welty spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 750 admirers in the library. In that same year the Eudora Welty Society was organized to promote the study of her work, and she also became the first recipient of the Cleanth Brooks Medal for distinguished achievement in southern letters. Also in 1991 she was honored by the National Book Foundation, whose tribute declared, "For the past five decades she has produced a body of fiction equal to any other writer of our time -- and some say preeminent." Those present for her acceptance of the ten-thousand-dollar prize commented on her "modest acceptance speech [compared to] Saul Bellow's boorish one" the previous year, according to Publishers Weekly (6 December 1991).
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