Start with A curtain of green, her first collection. It contains the three stories everyone eventually reads — the monologue of a woman who has moved into the post office to spite her family, the old woman walking the long road to town for her grandson's medicine, and the beauty parlour story that is much crueller than its setting suggests. Thirty pages in you will know whether Welty is for you, which is not true of any of the novels.
The obvious alternative is The optimist's daughter, which won the Pulitzer and is frequently recommended as the entry point. It is a superb short novel and it is also late, spare and grief-shaped, written by someone who had stopped explaining herself. It rewards you far more once you can hear how much she has stripped out.
The stories, in order
A curtain of green first, then The wide net, which is stranger and more folkloric — the Natchez Trace stories, half tall tale and half dream. Neither collection is long.
The golden apples is the ambitious one: seven linked stories set in a single Mississippi town over decades, with characters who recur at different ages and a substrate of Greek myth running underneath. It is also the hardest thing she wrote, and first-time readers routinely finish it unsure what happened. That is not a failure on your part; it is a book that assumes rereading. Put it third, not first.
If you would rather have one volume than three, the Collected Stories of Eudora Welty gathers all of these and more between two covers. Our catalogue lists the original collections separately, so you will be assembling by hand here.
The novels
Delta wedding is a plantation household in the 1920s over the few days around a wedding, with no plot to speak of and an enormous cast — a novel about a family's collective consciousness. Read it when you have the patience for it.
The Ponder heart is a comic monologue, short and very funny, narrated by a hotel proprietor who cannot stop talking. It is the easiest of the novels and a good palate cleanser.
Losing battles is the wall. It is long, set over a single day at a family reunion, and told almost entirely in dialogue with hardly any interior access to anyone. Readers who love it love it completely; readers who bounce off it bounce hard. It is not the book to test whether you like Welty.
The robber bridegroom is the outlier — a short fairy-tale novella that mixes Grimm with Mississippi frontier legend, and reads unlike everything else in the list. Fit it in wherever; it takes an evening.
The optimist's daughter belongs at the end of the fiction. A woman returns to Mississippi for her father's operation and stays for the aftermath, and the whole novel turns on what she is willing to admit about her family. It is the best-made thing she wrote.
On writing, and on herself
The eye of the story collects the essays and reviews, including the pieces on Austen, Faulkner and Chekhov and the much-quoted essay on place in fiction. It is the best evidence that she was as good a reader as she was a writer.
One writer's beginnings came out of three lectures at Harvard and is the short book to end on. It is about listening, seeing and memory as the raw materials of a writer, and it is about ninety pages. Read it last, when you already know what those materials produced.
If you read three, read A curtain of green, The optimist's daughter and One writer's beginnings. That is the story writer, the novelist and the account of where both came from. Related Southern-fiction sequences sit on the Welty hub.
Follow the full ordered path here: Eudora Welty in Order: Where to Start with the Stories and the Novels.
