Let's Bust a Recap : The Optimist's Daughter

This was my first book by Eudora Welty and it's going to be a hard one to recap. There's a quote about Eudora Welty on the front flap of the dust jacket of this book:

"It is easy to praise Eudora Welty, but it is not so easy to analyze the elements in her work that make it so easy—and such a deep pleasure—to praise. To say that may, indeed, be the highest praise, for it implies that the work, at its best, is so fully created, so deeply realized, and formed with such apparent innocence that it offers only itself, in shining unity."

Robert Penn Warren said that, and his book, All the King's Men, has been sitting on my shelf unread for years. It's one of those in the canon of Southern literature that I feel compelled to read, but just haven't gotten to. Which puts him in the same category as Eudora Welty for me. I've been collecting Welty's work over the years for her place in that canon. She sits up there with Faulkner and Twain, and that's why her books are on my LIFE LIST. She was a brilliant woman who lived from 1909 to 2001, and she won about every award in the book. The Optimist's Daughter was her Pulitzer Prize winning short novel, and it was wonderful.

But why was it wonderful? That's where Robert Penn Warren's quote comes in. It's hard to analyze that. Originally published in 1969 as a long story in The New Yorker, Welty then revised it and published it as a book in 1972. On the surface, it's a story about a woman named Laurel Hand who comes home from Chicago to help her ailing father through the surgery and recovery of his eye. But after his surgery, which takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, he continues to decline ultimately succumbing to death, and Laurel and her father's young second wife Fay have to take him home to Mount Salus, Mississippi to lay him to rest. 

But beneath the surface, Welty creates a rich sense of place in this short novel, and paints the reader a portrait of Southern life, of coming home to your people after a long absence. Being taken care of and loved. Coming to grips with your memories and identity. Dealing with grief and loss. All her characters jump off the page and right into the real world. Welty creates a beautiful melancholy in The Optimist's Daughter that must be experienced, not described. I can't say anything more than that it felt so authentic and real and lived. Welty truly does have a gift, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work. 

Have you read any of Eudora Welty's work? Do you collect books from a specific genre that is important to you?