Vital to all of Welty's work is the knitting together of the actual and the imaginative. As she says in One Writer's Beginnings (1984), "My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world." Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Robber Bridegroom where she uses an actual setting in an historical frame and peoples it with figures from both history and fantasy. (The Harp brothers were flesh and blood outlaws, and Mike Fink was a legendary flatboatman on the Mississippi River.) Some of the book's episodes are based on real events, others are pure invention, and still others are a blend of the two or lifted in fragments from the Grimm brothers or from myth and legend.

Much of the book reads like a fairy tale, and its name, of course, is...