Southern Comfort

You could call Eudora Welty, who died in Jackson, Miss., on July 23, at 92, one of America's most beloved storytellers. But this writer, a creature of the porch swing rather than the PR firm, could never fit her big-boned frame into any cliche, especially those that concerned literary fame. Welty, who wrote most of her fiction by a window in her old family home, where tunes from a nearby music school mingled with the click-clack of her Smith-Corona, gave the world and its characters more love and attention than she ever demanded, or even inquired about, for herself.

In her best novels, Delta Wedding (1946), The Ponder Heart (1954), and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), and in her canonical short stories -- ''Why I Live at the P.O.,'' ''A Curtain of Green,'' and ''The Golden Apples'' among them -- Welty depicted the epic foolishness of the most trivial human battles without unduly shaming the warriors or thumbing her nose at their motivations. She was gentle, innocent of harshness. Her setting was almost always a fertile Mississippi, her themes at once domestic and mythic. ''She was an enormous figure in American literature, not just Southern literature,'' says Shannon Ravenel, a former editor of the Best American Short Stories series. ''She's been an enormous influence on the current generation of writers, probably much more of an influence than Faulkner.''

Unlike her high-modernist peer up in Oxford, Welty never won the Nobel Prize. It was said she was passed over because she didn't travel far from home or because the world thought her work insufficiently polemical for a Southerner living through the civil rights era. Perhaps the committee hadn't read her story ''The Demonstrators'' or understood the title question of her essay ''Must the Novelist Crusade?'' No matter: The fuss resulting from a Nobel would have intruded on the private life Welty took pains to keep private, and she could console herself with honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the National Medal of the Arts, and the French Legion of Honor.

An eccentric maiden lady of the old school, Welty had spindly legs, big feet, and a hump on her back that went beyond the mere suggestion. In 1925, during her freshman year at the Mississippi State College for Women, she drew attention for her height and her smile (a radiant trademark). After finishing her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin, she headed to Columbia's Graduate School of Business. Before the start of her second year, she was summoned back to Jackson. Her father, Christian -- who'd sent his daughter to business school because he couldn't figure how she'd make a living writing stories -- had leukemia. After his death, Welty remained in Jackson, later nursing her mother and two brothers. She began the comic novel Losing Battles on a notebook held next to the steering wheel during trips to the hospital to visit her mother.

The vision of Welty, squeezed into her jalopy, trying to work as she drove to comfort loved ones, calls to mind one of her greatest stories. In ''A Worn Path,'' an elderly slave woman wills her aching body through the muddy woods to secure medicine for her ailing grandchild. In Welty's hands, the journey becomes an epic labor of love, an odyssey expressive of all the quiet acts of human greatness. It is a lasting record of all that she stood for.