Eudora Welty (1909–2001), short story writer, novelist, and book reviewer, was born in Jackson, Mississippi. Writing about her sheltered upbringing, Welty says in her brief autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings (1984): "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." After studying at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia's Graduate School of Business, Welty returned to Jackson, where she worked for newspapers and a radio station. She then served as publicity agent for President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, the agency formed to provide work for people during the Great Depression. As she traveled through the state for the WPA, Welty took her now-famous photographs of poverty in rural Mississippi. These images inspired Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). In her next collection, The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), Welty again shared stories of small-town Mississippi, finding in them the timeless themes and patterns of myth.

In her first novel, Delta Wedding (1946), Welty explores the experience and values of women characters and honors the community and harmony created by mothers for their families. The Optimist's Daughter (1972), focusing on a daughter's care for her aging father, won the Pulitzer Prize. The novel brought renewed attention to Welty's writing, as well as requests for interviews and speaking engagements. Book reviews that she wrote over a span of forty years were published in A Writer's Eye (1994).

Welty's legacy is a fictional chronicle of Mississippi life that affirms the sustaining power of community and family life at the same time as it observes the need for solitude. Working with the twin themes of "love and separateness," Welty celebrates the love of men and women, the many dimensions and stages of women's lives, and the fleeting joys of childhood.