Volume 27, Number 19 · December 4, 1980
Mississippi Myths
By Robert Towers
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
by Eudora Welty
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 622 pp., $17.50
My experience in reading the whole body of stories (a number of them encountered for the first time) was to some degree disconcerting. For I had assumed, naively, that they would repeat a certain shapeliness of development appropriate to a career as distinguished and as frequently honored as Eudora Welty's—that they would show a rising curve of achievement, followed by a high plateau of steady production above which several exceptional pieces would glisten like peaks. Instead, the most original and interesting stories are clustered, in my opinion, at the very beginning of the thirty years of publication; and while some of the later stories are indeed accomplished, they seem to mark a return to the strengths of an earlier mode rather than an advance into new and challenging territory.
Review, 3154 words
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