With the publication of The Eye of the Story and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, American fiction-writer Eudora Welty achieved the recognition she had long deserved. Her position was confirmed in 1984 when her autobiographical One Writer's Beginnings made the best-seller lists with sales exceeding 100,000 copies. During the early decades of her career, Welty was respected by fellow writers but often dismissed by critics as a regionalist, a miniaturist, or an oversensitive "feminine" writer. The late 1970s and 1980s, however, saw a critical reevaluation of her work. Michael Kreyling declared in Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order that the value of her work is not that it is "primarily regional writing, or even excellent regional writing, but [that it conveys] the vision of a certain artist who must be considered with her peers--[Virginia] Woolf, [Elizabeth] Bowen, and [E. M.] Forster."

Marked by a subtle, lyrical narrative, Welty's work...