By Michael Kreyling

She did not die young, like Scott Fitzgerald, of a symbolic weakness of the heart. Her death, on July 23, did not conclude a great agony of a life, as did her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner’s. Nor did she suffer a long, public disease, like Flannery O’Connor, whose early passing from lupus qualified her for sainthood in the minds of many readers. Eudora Welty died too old. At 92, she had been with us in body only for several years—frail, hunched, increasingly immobile, increasingly bereft of almost every memory of herself and her great work.

When my wife Chris and I saw Eudora Welty for the last time, in the living room of her house in Jackson, Miss., last March, she gave no sign that she knew who we were: two people who had met her for the first time in that same living room almost 30 years earlier, and at least once a year since. Four months ago, there was only a sliver of Eudora there when she blithely lifted her head, looked through her front window, and whispered that the sunlight shining through the pines made the trees look like ostrich feathers. The joy of writing is hard to kill.

Now the question is: What have we lost? When a certain kind of writer dies—one whose subject matter was the so-called great issue of the day—the obituaries write themselves. When Faulkner died—a writer who had made the indelible stain of our racism his subject—we knew what to say. But Welty mostly stayed away from war and peace, crime and punishment. She did write one story about the Civil War, “The Burning,” just to show that she could, and she did execute a fair imitation of Faulkner’s style in it, also to show that she could. She also wrote “Where is the Voice Coming From?” a blistering story of race hatred triggered by the murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson in 1963. She finished it in one sitting the night Evers was gunned down, and sent it to The New Yorker the next day. The editors trashed their regular publication schedule, and ran the story less than a month later. Welty’s account proved to be so true to the facts that The New Yorker’s lawyers got nervous. She got everything right except Byron De La Beckwith’s name, proving that she might have been a Southern lady, but she understood hate.

More often, though, her work (four collections of short stories, five novels, a children’s book, a memoir, essays, and reviews) explores lives most of us would consider ordinary. “Sheltered” was Eudora’s word: “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life.” What we have lost is a writer who showed us that knowing where to stand and how to look “can be a daring life as well.”

Welty was born April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi, to parents who had nothing invested in the myth of the South. Her mother came from unionist West Virginia, her father from German-Swiss settlers in rural Ohio. As newlyweds, Welty’s parents chose Jackson, where her father took a job with Lamar Life Insurance. Mr. Welty, stricken with leukemia, died in 1931 during a failed blood transfusion—the donor was his wife—as Eudora watched them both. She was 22, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and in the middle of a two-year business program at Columbia University. Her father’s death determined a certain fate: She returned to Mississippi and to her mother, to the house her father had built, and wrote from the same address until her death last week.

If she could not be a wanderer in the wide world, she would make the world she did live in take its place. Welty took up photography, one of her father’s hobbies. She rigged a temporary darkroom in the kitchen and printed her own negatives. Practice with the camera helped her get a job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Mississippi as a publicity agent, taking pictures of projects all over the state.

Welty was also writing. WPA exposure to the range of places and people in her own state sparked stories. In 1935, she assembled a collection of short fiction and photographs and shopped the project to publishers in New York. She got no action from the publishers, but she did get two shows of her photographic works at galleries in the city.

In 1936, Manuscript, described by Welty as a “little magazine,” took “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic.” Once these stories were out, Welty’s mail brought a stream of inquiries from editors. They all loved her stories, but would only publish a novel. Between Welty and the novel, though, was a crooked path. This was the age of “The Great American Novel,” dominated by Maxwell Perkins and his striving “sons” at Scribner’s: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe. It was not the novel itself, but the kind of novel written by this group, that Welty did not want to write. She knew her creative heart would not be in it.

Yet Virginia Woolf showed her a way. While working for The New York Times Book Review in 1944, Welty got a posthumous book by Woolf to review. In it she found an alternate method of telling a long story. Not from A to Z with relentless linear logic, but by a series of shutter-clicks, stopped moments in which characters revealed complex interrelationships with people and places and things in their surround. Some of these moments are conscious, but most are not. Critics of this style—and there were many at the time—complained that the unconscious connections made the story obscure and precious. That was almost 60 years ago, and her books are still in print.

So what have we lost? In literary terms, nothing. With the 1984 publication of her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty’s writing career came to a close. Although her body of work is by some standards small—she was an extraordinarily frugal and careful writer—it is miraculous in its fertility. There is always a new facet, a sudden undercurrent that sweeps up, even for a hell-bent scholarly reader of three decades. And there are beginnings for new readers.

We have lost a certain sense of writing as work. Welty wrote on a manual typewriter, making revisions in pencil and pen. Sometimes she literally cut and pasted, taking scissors and pins from her mother’s sewing basket to rearrange manuscripts. She is of a generation of writers for whom the act of writing was manual labor, for whom the product of writing was a made thing with heft and thickness, a rustle and a smell.

For her a story or a novel was also like a child: It could get lost. In the 1930s, she sent the only copy of “Petrified Man,” now one of her most widely-known stories, to Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks at The Southern Review. Unable to decide whether to fish or cut bait, they eventually sent it back with apologies. Welty, needing some good news, got discouraged and tore the pages into confetti. A few days later, a note from Warren arrived: He could not get the story out of his head, was sorry he had ever rejected it, and asked for the text to be sent back to Baton Rouge ASAP. She had to rewrite the entire story from memory. Like the texts of some of Shakespeare’s plays, “Petrified Man” does not exist in an “original” version.

All the ups and downs came to an official end at Welty’s funeral. The writer who rooted her art in observing others—from behind a camera or a fictional point of view—was tethered in a closed casket while a team of ministers prayed and two civilian friends read farewells. The ritual was ripe with the kind of irony Welty would have savored. There are several funerals among the scenes in her work, and in none of them does the minister say anything meaningful to the moment. So it was again last Thursday afternoon.

Eudora Welty did not need praying over. What we needed to do was to thank her for being a writer, and the best way to do that would have been to read what she had made of the words available to all of us. There is a funeral at the end of The Golden Apples, in which several generations in a small Southern town gather to bury an old lady who kept house, milked cows, and told stories. Two preachers are in attendance, but their prayers are not recorded. This is how the funeral ends:

“They left the cemetery without looking at anything, and some parted with the company at the gate. Attrition was their wisdom. Already, tomorrow’s rain pelted the grave with loudness, and made hasty streams run down its sides, like a mountain red with rivers, already settling the patient work of them all; not one little ‘made’ flower holder, but all, would topple; and so had, or might as well have, done it already; this was the past now.”

Michael Kreyling is the author of three books on Eudora Welty, including Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order; Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell; and Understanding Eudora Welty. He also edited two volumes of Welty’s work for The Library of America.

Michael Kreyling is the author of three books on Eudora Welty, including Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order; Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell; and Understanding Eudora Welty. He also edited two volumes of Welty’s work for The Library of America.