SOURCE: Vande Kieft, Ruth M. “The Search for the Golden Apples.” In Eudora Welty, pp. 111–49. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962.

In the following essay, Vande Kieft discusses the unifying elements of the stories in The Golden Apples.

I

The most complex and encompassing of Miss Welty's works is The Golden Apples, a book which can be read not merely as a collection of short stories but as a novel which gathers up several of the motifs of her earlier fiction. The unity of the book derives not only from its focus on the characters who within a forty-year span live and die in one small Mississippi town, Morgana, but from its richly thematic, symbolic, mythical patterns of organization. The best approach to that unity is through the Yeats poem from which Miss Welty draws her title:

The Song of the Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood...