Universal Embrace of a ‘Regionalist’

You won’t find Eudora Welty, the fiction writer and memoirist who died Monday at 92, on the California Department of Education’s recommended reading list, and that’s too bad. Schoolchildren who don’t read “Why I Live at the P.O.”--or better yet, hear a recording of Welty reading the story in her melodious Mississippi accent--miss one of life’s delights.

Early in her long career, Welty was pigeonholed as a regionalist writing about “minor” (read: women’s) themes like marriage, family and gossip. How could such works, often written with gut-busting humor, be taken seriously? Later critics appreciated how Welty’s eye for detail and ear for dialogue captured a place in time--and how her examination of relationships transcended it.

She won everything from a Pulitzer Prize to a Medal of Freedom. In 1998 she became the first living writer to be included in the Library of America series of collected works, alongside such giants as Walt Whitman (who has one book on the California reading list), Mark Twain (four books), Henry James (three) and William Faulkner (two).

But the real judges were her readers, generations of them. Her tale of an eccentric small-town postmistress who moves out of her family home to live at the post office so delighted software designer Steve Dorner as a child that when he developed his widely used e-mail program, he named the cyber post office Eudora.

Welty was born before the 20th century’s first appearance of Halley’s comet and lived to see its return. What a light she herself leaves behind.