These works are largely Mississippian in setting and atmosphere, for an important tenet of Eudora Welty's fictional theory is that attachment to place, or "regionalism," is not restrictive but becomes a means to universality in great literature, a way of getting to the roots of what is constant in human experience. She has produced a body of work which often seems more like a precious and alluring collection of smaller art objects than a great artistic oeuvre. Yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, much as they defy the process of summing up, and nothing could fairly be said of one work that might not be contradicted in another.
Eudora Welty has been full and generous in discussing her art, which she has done in several of the essays (subtitled "On Writing") included in her nonfiction collection The Eye of the Story (1978), as well as in response to the questions of interviewers. But for many years she backed off from the idea of her own biography. The prospect, she told an interviewer in 1972, made her "shy, and discouraged at the very thought, because to me a writer's work should be everything.
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