[In the following review, Homberger states that Welty's "One Writer's Beginnings is a reminder that the imagination can be as nourished by Jackson, Mississippi, as by Henry James's London, Kafka's Prague or Kundera's Brno."]

When in 1965, during the civil rights movement, Eudora Welty wrote that "Entering the hearts and minds of our own people is no harder now than it ever was", the most common response was a subdued sense of shock at a writer so little carried away by the dramatic struggles taking place around her.

The argument that Welty's work fails to register the great traumas of the age is a way of placing her "interest" as Southern, and therefore as regional. No myth-maker like Faulkner, her work stands or falls on the sense of place, the particular character of Mississippi. She understands her people with uncanny precision. Her brief story on the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", was a fine gesture of imaginative insight. When the killer was finally caught, Welty remarks in the preface to her collected stories, it was necessary to revise certain details in her wholly invented characterization, because they had been disturbingly close to the truth.

Looking back on the 1960s, Welty recently commented on the scale of the changes which came in the wake of the civil rights movement: I think we've been through an experience which was more profound than we'd guessed, both black and white. Now we are both more open in a way that—well, I had not experienced it because it had never happened. Now, seeing how much more there was to communication than the wish, and the desire, and the heart, I feel I have more to learn now than I had to learn then.

The learning process continues. Mississippi is no longer the Demon incarnate; young college students find cocaine a better high than civil rights; and there aren't all that many unregistered black voters in the South any more. But of the rich literature of the South in this period, Welty's stories and novels look the most likely to survive.

As the appreciation of her achievement deepens, and as her stories find more and more readers, the world which permeates her writing seems remote, even historical. She was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the sleepiest state capital in the United States, her parents having come to Jackson at the start of their married life from Ohio and West Virginia. Long family trips north from Mississippi to visit her relations (it took a week to drive each way in the 1920s) gave Welty a sense of an "outside" world which she recalls vividly in the Harvard lectures which have now been published as One Writer's Beginnings:

Towns little or big had beginnings and ends, they reached to an edge and stopped, where the country began again as though the hadn't happened. They were intact and to themselves. You could see a town lying ahead in its whole, as definitely formed as a plate on a table. And your road entered and ran straight through the heart of it; you could see it all, laid out for your passage through. Towns, like people, had clear identities and your imagination could go out to meet them. You saw houses, yards, fields, and people busy in them, the people that had a life where they were. You could hear their bank clocks, striking, you could smell their bakeries. You would know those towns again, recognize the salient detail, see so close up. Nothing was blurred, and in passing along Main Street, slowed down from twenty-five to twenty miles an hour, you didn't miss anything on either side.

In a review of Welty's Delta Wedding in 1946, Isaac Rosenfeld argued that "the serious American writer cannot but be alienated from American society, close though he may be to it, and much though he may wish to belong". Rosenfeld could not understand how a Southern writer could "really and truly feel at home in his home." Welty was perhaps too polite, too much the Southern lady, to ask the same question of Rosenfeld's (and Saul Bellow's) Chicago. Received opinion has, for the most part, agreed with Rosenfeld, and it was Bellow, not Welty, who won the Nobel Prize. Taking Welty seriously would mean questioning the massive investment in modernism and alienation in American culture. One Writer's Beginnings is a reminder that the imagination can be as nourished by Jackson, Mississippi, as by Henry James's London, Kafka's Prague or, Kundera's Brno.