Although Welty saw a good deal of poverty in her work for the WPA during the depression, and although she grew up in a class conscious South, her work rarely espouses social causes.

Her subject is the humanity that links all people rather than the social issues that divide them. In fact, in 1965, in answer to critics who expected her to use her fiction to promote social equality, she published "Must the Novelist Crusade" in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly. She insists in that essay that "the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction any good." In another sense, however, all of Welty's writing focuses on social concerns because she writes about human matters, principally human relationships and the relationship between the individual and the community.

In The Robber Bridegroom, Welty takes a piece of her country's past...