She had already been successful, however, in getting her work into magazines. Her first story appeared in a “little magazine” named Manuscript in 1936, and within three years Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the influential Southern Review, published six other stories, including three in the present collection: “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “Petrified Man,” and “The Hitch-Hikers.” Soon “A Worn Path,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and “Powerhouse” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941, with a preface by Katherine Anne Porter; a short novel, The Robber Bridegroom, followed in 1942, and her second collection of stories, The Wide Net, in 1943. Delta Wedding, a full-length novel, appeared in 1946; The Golden Apples, a book of connected stories, in 1949; The Bride of the Innisfallen, a miscellaneous collection, in 1955; and The Ponder Heart, another short novel, in 1954.

In 1942 and in 1943, Miss Welty received first prize O. Henry Memorial awards for “The Wide Net” and “Livvie”; she held two Guggenheim Fellowships, and The Ponder Heart won her the William Dean Howells medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “the most distinguished work of American fiction during the period from 1950–1955.” She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952, and has been an Honorary Consultant of the Library of Congress. Although she makes public appearances, both lecturing and reading her stories, and now and again contributes her perceptive criticism to various magazines and reviews, she is generally out of the public eye, warmly admired by her friends, quietly dedicated to the practice of her art.

The dominant characteristics of Miss Welty’s fiction are the lyrical impulse that provides its inciting force and unity, the emphasis on place that gives it focus, and the scope and experimentation that lend it variety.

In an essay called “How I Write,” she has supplied her own answer to the question, “Where do the stories come from?” The source is the lyrical impulse—“the impulse to praise, to love, to call up, to prophesy.” It is “the outside signal that has startled or moved the creative mind to complicity and brought the story to active being: the irresistible, the magnetic, the alarming (pleasurable or disturbing), the overwhelming person, place, or thing.” Her stories may be viewed, then, as celebrations of so many pieces of life with “the mysteries rushing unsubmissively through them by the minute”: life not so much analyzed and interpreted as rendered and wondered at, perhaps because what is shown is extraordinary, perhaps because it is simply ordinary.