The debut of a great American writer: Eudora Welty's first short-story collection

Finished the first "collection" (A Curtain of Green, 1941) in Eudora Welty's "Collected Stories," and can see that it was just a tremendous debut collection, in an era when short stories mattered and magazines actually published them - this collection obviously stood out and introduced a major writer, a writer very much of the South (all but one story set in the South, generally Mississippi) but not regional in the narrow, folksy sense - definitely a national writer. In addition to the obvious and famous standouts, such as Why I Live at the P.O., which truly established Welty's comic voice and wry sensibility, there were a few surprises for me: the very poignant A Memory (I think this and P.O. are the only ones in the fist person, but this narrator so obviously close to Welty that it seems more of an essay/memoir), a slight story on first glance but, as noted in an earlier post, a miniature account of her whole career and sensibility as a writer - turning away from the traditional and the "pretty" and drawing her inspiration from the lively, bumbling, sometimes foolish people all around her - the sand-tossers - while missing out personally on traditional love and marriage. Another surprise: The Death of a Traveling Salesman, a very sad and beautiful story about a salesman, ill, lost in rural Mississippi, taken into a farmhouse and taken care of briefly, and his misjudgments about the couple that takes him in: again, a story of missed connection, of yearning for love that is just out of reach, of the sadness of a life unfulfilled.