![]() The frail old woman, called Phoenix, travels slowly and painfully through a sometimes hostile landscape, described in rich and abundant detail. A Worn PathĪnother relatively early story, “A Worn Path,” recounts an ancient black woman’s long and perilous journey on foot from her remote rural home to the nearest town. When he leaves their house in the morning, his heart pounds loudest of all as he carries his bags to his car frantically he tries to stifle the sound and dies, his heart unheard by anyone but himself. The unspoken warmth in the relationship of the couple is contrasted with the salesman’s loneliness, and he repeatedly worries that they can hear the loud pounding of his heart, physically weakened from a recent illness and metaphorically empty of love. At the nearest farm dwelling, the salesman finds a simple, taciturn couple who assist him with his car and give him a meal and a place to stay for the night. One of her earliest stories, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” tells of a commercial traveler who loses his way in the hill country of Mississippi and accidentally drives his car into a ravine. Perhaps the only constant in Welty’s fiction is her unerring keenness of observation, both of physical landscape and in characterization, and her ability to create convincing psychological portraits of an immensely varied cast of characters. Elements of myth and symbol often appear in her work, but she uses them in shadowy, inexplicit ways. Thematically, she concerns herself both with the importance of family and community relations and, paradoxically, with the strange solitariness of human experience. The majority of her stories are set in her beloved Mississippi Delta country, of which she paints a vivid and detailed picture, but she is equally comfortable evoking such diverse scenes as a northern city or a transatlantic ocean liner. Although some dominant themes and characteristics appear regularly in Eudora Welty’s (Ap– July 23, 2001) fiction, her work resists categorization. ![]()
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