Miss Welty’s own place is, of course, Mississippi—its towns and countryside, its red clay farms and hills, its pine forests, lakes, rivers, and Delta bottoms. Pre-eminently, in the stories of this collection, it is the Natchez Trace, a path originally carved out of the wilderness by animals, later followed by Indians, and then literally deepened into the forest bed as it was traveled by river-men making their way home after coming down the Mississippi, by traders, pioneers, settlers, mail carriers, cutting northeast upward from Natchez toward Nashville, Tennessee. It is on this ancient Trace, in pioneer times, that we find evangelist Lorenzo Dow riding his horse at top speed to encounter two other actual historical characters, the outlaw James Murrell and the naturalist John James Audubon, the three converging on the wilderness floor for their “still moment” of private revelation—Miss Welty’s purely imaginary addition to an actuality already mysterious and legendary. It is away up on the old abandoned Trace that Solomon carries Livvie to his “nice house” in the country; it is the Trace that William Wallace and his entourage follow, on their way to the Pearl River, in “The Wide Net”; it is from back off the Trace that Phoenix makes her “worn path,” and her destination is Natchez, the “little party-giving town” where Old Mr. Marblehall is leading his fantastic double life.

Whether or not they are fictional, Miss Welty’s place names always sound right: that is, both probable and improbable, according to the vagaries of history and humanity. And this is symptomatic of the larger and more important Tightness that derives from the happy fusion of imaginative vision and actuality of place in her fiction. Place has given the social accuracy, including its comic vitality, to those of her stories that present Southern towns and clans, such as “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and “The Wide Net.” She has described certain of her stories, such as “Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.,” as having been written “by ear.” That acutely tuned ear has caught the speech of a way of life, of a set of shared and yet subtly various social traditions, prejudices, interests, problems, human reactions, as well as private foibles and idiosyncrasies, flashes of sheer oddness, perversity, or humor, which continually surprise us by their freshness and convince us by their fidelity. The dialogue in many of the stories begs to be read aloud. The rhythms and idioms, and a rhetoric at once plain and fancy, economical and elaborate, bend the most recalcitrant accents and intonations to a gossipy Southern loquaciousness that is at the same time dreadful, funny, and touching.