JACKSON, Miss. — Eudora Welty, whose brilliant short stories, notable for the evocativeness of their imagery and the sharpness of their dialogue and wit, made her the most revered figure in contemporary American letters, died on Monday. She was 92.
Welty was plagued by health problems and had been confined for some time to the home that her father built in Jackson, Miss., where she had lived since high school and where she wrote most of her stories, novels, essays, memoirs and book reviews.
As a short-story master Welty is mentioned by critics in the same breath with Chekhov, but she was often dismissed early in her career as a regionalist and she did not receive widespread critical respect until she was no longer young. When it came, she accepted it with the ease, modesty and grace that had become her hallmark.
Welty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel "The Optimist's Daughter." She also received the National Book Critics Award, the American Book Award, several O. Henry Awards and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was inducted into the French Legion of Honor and received the Medal of Freedom in 1980, presented, she said happily, by "one of my great Southern heroes, President Jimmy Carter."
Late in 1998 Welty was "excited and delighted" to learn that she had become the first living writer ever included in the prestigious Library of America series of collected works by the nation's literary giants.
The library's break with its long tradition of choosing only dead authors for its series of definitive collections ushered Welty into a pantheon that includes Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner.
For decades she was pigeonholed by many critics who placed her with Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers as a writer of the so-called Southern School. Her reputation as a regional and apolitical writer was often cited as a reason that she failed to receive a Nobel Prize. But her work, like that of those other Southerners, transcended region and possessed a universal relevance and appeal.
"It is not the South we find in her stories, it is Eudora Welty's South, a region that feeds her imagination and a place we come to trust," Maureen Howard said when she reviewed Welty's "Collected Stories" in 1980. "She is a Southerner as Chekhov was a Russian, because place provides them with a reality — a reality as difficult, mysterious and impermanent as life."
Eudora Welty was born April 13, 1909, in Jackson, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty, a native of Ohio, and the former Chestina Andrews, who had been a West Virginia schoolteacher. ("I was always aware," she wrote, "that there were two sides to most questions.") The Weltys settled in Jackson shortly after their marriage, and Christian Welty became an executive of the Lamar Life Insurance company. They also had two sons younger than Eudora.
The Weltys were a book-loving family, devoted to reading and learning. In "One Writer's Beginnings," Welty's 1984 memoir based on a series of lectures she gave at Harvard, she recalled the exhilaration she felt when she fell under the spell of books.
"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass," she said. "Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them."
Welty was a daily visitor to the local Andrew Carnegie Library, where she was allowed what she later called "a sweet devouring" — a ration of two books a day by the stern-faced librarian. Several decades later, in 1986, the library was replaced; the new one was named the Eudora Welty Library.
Welty learned to read before starting public school and began turning out stories as a child.
"It took Latin to thrust me into a bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning," she wrote. "Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street, where I could walk through it on my way to school and hear underfoot the echo of its marble floor and over me the bell of its rotunda."
"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories," Welty wrote in 1984. "Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."
Welty attended the Mississippi State College for Women, where she helped to start a literary magazine, and then the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1929. After college Welty told her parents she wanted to be a writer, but she said her father insisted that she "learn something to fall back on" to support herself, so she took advertising courses at the Columbia University School of Business.
Back in Jackson in the early 1930s, Welty wrote for a radio station and contributed society items to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. During the Depression she got a publicity job at the Works Progress Administration, which enabled her to travel throughout Mississippi. She was troubled and fascinated by the people she saw and took hundreds of snapshots with a cheap camera, developing her prints in her kitchen at night.
In 1971, Random House published a collection of these pictures, "One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression." Those stark, often grim black-and-white photographs revealed that Welty's long-admired skill at observation was not limited to the ear.