The Necessary Optimist

Last year was in many ways the best and worst of years for Eudora Welty. Not only did more than the usual number of tributes come her way, all richly deserved for a career of astonishing literary achievement; more pointedly, proof of her achievement--five novels, four collections of short stories (and two previously uncollected stories), nine essays, and a memoir--was brought together in two handsome volumes in the Library of America series, an honor tantamount to canonization and so far accorded no other living American writer.

But the year also had its lows, not the least being the poor health that has kept the 87-year-old writer less "locally underfoot" in her native Jackson, Mississippi, than she ever imagined being. For someone who has derived so much inspiration from the lifeline of gossip, house-bound immobility resulting from advanced arthritis and osteoporosis has been a hard blow--almost as hard as the abandonment of writing gradually forced upon her by those same afflictions.

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