Why Eudora Welty is a great writer

Here's some of what Eudora Welty isn't: her stories have humor and some of her most famous, generally her early stories, have a lot of humor and are easily seen as precursors to the darker and more allegorical work of F.O'Connor, but Welty increasingly moved away from Southern Gothic style as she matured. Her stories fall outside of the expected modes: they are not about a single action with a crisis or conflict and a (somewhat ambiguous) resolution. They are not, on the other hand, about a single epiphanic moment, a snapshot of life ending on a poignant phrase or image. To the extent that there is an arc at all, it is a flattened arc - her stories more typically involve a few hours of passing time or, if longer, a journey from point A to B, but without a real shape or conclusion. Some of her characters are the outsiders who typically populate American short fiction, but her stories are rarely driven by character - they tend to have many characters, each sharply drawn but not fully rounded. Finally her stories extremely rarely explore social themes. So what makes them so great? First of all, the vividness of the writing, beautiful descriptions not only of landscape but of feeling and perception - she pays a slight homage to Proust in one of her late stories, but the influence is present through much of her work. Second, the subtlety of her characters and their behavior - she doesn't explain anything, just presents the action as it unfolds before us, and her, and often requires us to really work to figure out what's going on - just as we do in life. I admire her for her willingness to try different themes, styles, even topics - she obviously could have made a whole career writing about the Southern types that we see in her first stories, including the famous Petrified Man and Why I Live at the P.O. - but she pushes herself to look at a wide variety of character, most sharing her Mississippi roots. Some of the great stories include Death of a Traveling Salesman, Music from Spain, The Bride of the Innisfallen, No Place for You, My Love, and possibly Where Are the Voices Coming From? - and you can see, if you read each, that they share a sensibility but that they're markedly different in topic and approach. At times her stories are exasperating with their subtlety and refusal to offer narrative compromises, but when you read through her "Collected Stories" you can see that she is a unique voice and at her best a truly great writer.