She was the oldest surviving child born in 1909 and only daughter of a West Virginia schoolteacher

She was the oldest surviving child, born in 1909, and only daughter, of a West Virginia schoolteacher and an Ohio businessman who had decided to seek their fortune in the capital of Mississippi. Like her mother, she was an early, eager reader – of fairy tales, myths, legends, parts of Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels. At the age of five, seated between two women on Sunday drives in the family car, she would say, "Now talk." Thus, her superb – universally recognised – ear for the nuances of speech developed.After graduation from high school in 1925 (the same year Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son, whom Welty never met, also graduated from a black school in segregated Jackson), she attended the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus until 1927, when she transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she switched from a major in art history to one in English and discovered her favourite poet, W B. Yeats.On finishing college, Welty was determined to be a writer. However, her parents, primarily her practical father, suggested that, as preparation for a more profitable career, she enrol in the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York City. So, with light course requirements, she savoured New York's theatre, movies, concerts, museums, and jazz clubs during the academic year of 1930-31.In the autumn of 1931, her father died of leukaemia at 52, and Welty returned to Jackson, which, although later she often satisfied her zest for travel both in America and abroad, continued to be her home for the rest of her life.

She composed most of her works on a typewriter in her upstairs room of the Tudor-style house built for her father in 1925.She never married but she formed lasting friendships with a remarkable range of human beings, adults and children, men and women, literary and non-literary; fittingly, her final volume was an anthology entitled The Norton [the publisher] Book of Friendship (1991). And her unfailing courtesy to one and all caused a close friend to generalise, "Everybody loves Eudora because Eudora loves everybody" – with a rare exception, be it noted, the Georgia novelist Carson McCullers, whom Welty actively disliked.During the Great Depression, of course, jobs vanished in Mississippi and almost every other place in the world. Nevertheless, Welty was hired by the local radio station as a handywoman; she also became the Jackson social correspondent for a Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper; helped to organise her young friends into "The Night-Blooming Cereus Club" (whose motto was "Don't take it cereus, life's too mysterious"); and in 1935 joined the national Works Progress Administration, a "recovery" programme begun by President Franklin Roosevelt, as a junior publicity agent.In that position, she travelled throughout the state, "writing news stories for county papers [and] taking pictures" of the people she met – an astonishing number, given the circumstances, black adults and children. Her accumulation of these, and other "snapshots", as she called them, gradually evoked widespread plaudits for Welty the masterful photographer. For example, in 1992, at the University of Chicago, an audience of over 1,000 heard her answer questions about her "pictures" on display.

Published collections include One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression (1971) and Eudora Welty: Photographs (1989).Taking pictures was accompanied by writing stories, which Welty had been doing intermittently since childhood. Initial submission of her mature stories produced only a tall pile of rejection slips. But in 1936 a "little" magazine in Athens, Ohio, published "Death of a Traveling Salesman", one of her masterpieces. More acceptances soon followed, notably six by The Southern Review, whose editors, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, became distinguished professors at Yale University and Welty's lifelong friends.In 1940, she reported later, "a decisive event in [her] writing life" occurred when she became a client of the New York literary agent Diarmuid Russell, son of the Irish man of letters George Russell (AE). Besides placing her fiction in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Russell earned Welty's total confidence and enduring devotion by his discerning appraisal of her work. For instance, he said that a story called "The Delta Cousins" looked to him "like Chapter Two of a novel".

Whereupon, she expanded the story into her first novel, Delta Wedding (1946), which focuses on the complex but loving relationships in a large, prosperous Mississippi Delta family.Three previous volumes, however, solidified her stature as an exceedingly gifted writer of fiction. The Curtain of Green (1941), dedicated to Diarmuid Russell and introduced by Katherine Anne Porter, an excellent writer herself and Welty's mentor, and The Wide Net (1943) contain many of her most highly esteemed stories. These include the hilarious "Why I Live at the P.O.", the reading of which led the American inventor Steve Dorner to entitle his e-mail software program "Eudora"; the frequently anthologised "A Worn Path", which describes an old black woman's arduous walk – one in a series – from the country to a Mississippi town in order to get medicine for her little grandson who had swallowed lye; and "A Still Moment", which brings together on the Old Natchez Trace three historical figures, including the ornithologist and artist John James Audubon. The Robber Bridegroom (1942), the third volume, is a rollicking tour de force combining fantasy, fairy-tale and folk-tale.Welty's other collections of stories are The Golden Apples (1949), her favourite among her books, consisting of interrelated stories set in an imaginary Mississippi town, and The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), whose contents are set both in the American South and in Europe.

After the publication of the former, Welty took her first trip abroad – to Italy, France, England and Ireland. Part of the latter was written while she was the guest of her Irish friend the writer Elizabeth Bowen, at her home in County Cork; and before it was published she presented her widely praised critical essay "Place in Fiction" at Cambridge University (1954).Welty's second, and funniest, novel, The Ponder Heart, a monologue subsequently adapted for the stage and performed in New York City and elsewhere, also came out in 1954. The third, longest, and biggest seller, Losing Battles (1970), which also concentrates on a large family gathering, was written over a period of 15 painful years marked by the extended illnesses and deaths of her mother and both her brothers. The last, the most autobiographical, and – for numerous critics – her finest novel, The Optimist's Daughter, was published in 1972. Her remaining fictional work, The Shoe Bird (1964), is a children's book which, though commonly neglected, sparkles with Welty's radiant humour.In her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), already acclaimed a classic in the United States, Welty divided the growth of her own creative ability into three stages: "Listening", "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice"; and, at the end, she named her memory, extraordinary by all accounts, as "the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer". Four years earlier, in concluding the preface to her Collected Stories, she declared:What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, young or old, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself.