SOURCE: Welty, Eudora. “Place and Time: The Southern Writer's Inheritance.¹” Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4 (fall 1997): 545-51.

In the following essay, first published in 1954, Welty discusses some general characteristics of Southern literature and praises the work of such modern novelists as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Peter Taylor.

As this was being written, the new book by William Faulkner is about to come out in America—a long novel entitled A Fable. One never knows ahead what a new work by Mr. Faulkner will be like—that is one of the joys of living contemporaneously with a genius. Now in the prime of his life, in the mid-fifties, he may well be giving us his major work; the talk is that he himself has an inkling that this is so. We shall have it here before long, and meanwhile the American critics are all giving cry. They ought to...