SOURCE: "Eudora Welty's Beginnings," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 120-26.

In the following review, Smith discusses what Welty teaches about the sensibility of the writer in her One Writer's Beginnings.

One Writer's Beginnings is a crucial book for the serious Eudora Welty scholar; for the reader who has been charmed and beguiled and moved over the years by her wonderful stories and novels; and for the beginning or not-so-beginning writer who has any interest in where it all comes from, anyway: fiction, I mean, and what in the world it has to do with life. The book originated in a set of three lectures delivered at Harvard University in April, 1983, to inaugurate the William E. Massey lecture series, and it remains so organized. The individual essays are entitled "Listening," "Learning to See," and "Finding a Voice," with a generous selection of Miss Welty's...