In the following essay, which originally appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1963, Isaacs shows how the deceptively "simple" story "A Worn Path" employs a number of meanings that make it more "densely complex" than it first appears.

The first four sentences of "A Worn Path" contain simple declarative statements using the simple past of the verb "to be": "It was December...," "... there was an old Negro woman.,.," "Her name was Phoenix Jackson," "She was very old and small...." The note of simplicity thus struck is the keynote of Eudora Welty's artistic design in the story. For it is a simple story (a common reaction is "simply beautiful"). But it is also a story which employs many of the devices which can make of the modern short story an intricate and densely complex form. It uses them, however, in such a way that it demonstrates how a single...