SOURCE: "Struggling against the Plaid: An Interview with Eudora Welty," reprinted in Listen to the Voices: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, Jo Brans, Southern Methodist University Press, 1988. (Originally printed in Southwest Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 255-66.)

In the following interview, Welty discusses her approach to writing and some of her characterizations.

Eudora Welty is the author of five collections of short stories, a book of photographs, a volume of essays, and five novels. For her novel The Ponder Heart she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal in 1955, and for The Optimist's Daughter she was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Among the most honored of American writers, she has also received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1979 the National Medal for Literature for lifetime achievement.

Jo Brans is a member of the English...