Eudora Welty's luminous artistry was introduced through her short stories, beginning with "Death of a Traveling Salesman," published in a "little magazine" in 1936, followed by a half dozen stories in The Southern Review that drew the praise of Katherine Anne Porter. A devotion to short fiction has continued throughout Miss Welty's career, producing some of her finest and best-loved work.

All her published stories are gathered here - those contained in A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples and The Bride of the Innisfallen, together with two stories previously uncollected. Although their events and settings are varied, and they range as far from Miss Welty's native Mississippi as Cork and Naples, they spring from a distinctive Southern sensibility, from the author's response to the place where she has always lives, from long familiarity with the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people around her. Yet the characters in her stories are anything but ordinary, in the commonplace she perceives what is unique. She is sensitively tuned to their voices and their minds, whether she is in the skin of a beautician, a salesman, or a jazz player. Time is as important an element in Eudora Welty's writing as place or character. She has said that one cannot live in the south without being conscious of it's history. A number of three stories reach back into the last century. Others reflect the Depression years. Two come from the convulsive 1960's. In her preface, Miss Welty tells of the murder of a civil rights leader that shocked her into writing "Where Is the Voice Coming From?"

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty demonstrates the art of the short story at its best, and it celebrates the lifelong achievement of a national treasure.