Central to all of Welty's writing is the fusion of reality and imagination. In her book One Writer's Beginnings (1984), she states, "My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world." This blend is most evident in The Robber Bridegroom, where she sets a real historical backdrop populated with both historical and mythical figures. The Harp brothers were real-life criminals, and Mike Fink was a legendary boatman on the Mississippi River. Some episodes in the book are inspired by actual events, others are entirely fictional, and some are a mix of both or borrowed in parts from the Grimm brothers or from myths and legends.

A significant portion of the book reads like a fairy tale, and its title is identical to its fairy tale namesake. Additionally, the book's oral storytelling quality makes it enjoyable to read aloud. The magic of the book is derived more from its language than its events, though the events are enchanting in their own right. For instance, the second paragraph, which portrays Clement's arrival at the frontier town of Rodney's Landing on the Mississippi River, encapsulates the essence of Welty's setting at the intersection of wilderness and civilization and underscores the imaginative role that shapes events and characters throughout the book:

As his foot touched the shore, the sun sank into the river the color of blood, and at once a wind sprang up and covered the sky with black, yellow, and green clouds the size of whales, which moved across the face of the moon... There were sounds of rushing and flying, from the flourish of carriages hurrying through the streets after dark, from the bellowing throats of the flatboatmen, and from the wilderness itself, which lifted and drew itself in the wind, and pressed its savage breath even closer to the little galleries of Rodney, and caused a bell to turn over in one of the steeples, and shook the fort and dropped a tree over the racetrack.

The book is filled with clever wordplay and whimsical humor. The first question Clement poses to his potential landlord in Rodney is, "But where have you left your right ear?" He only trusts individuals who have both ears, and the bigger, the better. Later, when Rosamond comes home naked after gathering herbs in the woods and claims that a bandit (Jamie Lockhart in disguise) took all her clothes but left her unharmed, Clement and Salome are understandably skeptical. "At first, they did not believe her, until there was no other option but to believe her, unless they decided to jump down the well." Welty often adds an unexpected phrase at the end of sentences to inject humor into situations, and she uses tall tales to create delightful moments whenever Mike Fink appears. In essence, this book seamlessly combines techniques from its diverse sources just as it blends its content.

Even though Welty encountered significant poverty during her time with the WPA in the Depression era and grew up in a socially stratified South, her writing seldom champions social causes. Her focus is on the shared humanity that unites people, rather than the societal issues that separate them. In 1965, responding to critics who wanted her fiction to advocate for social equality, she published an essay titled "Must the Novelist Crusade" in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly . In this essay, she argues that "the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction any good." Nonetheless, Welty's work inherently addresses social concerns, as...