Eudora Welty

Welty studied photography in New York before the Depression sent her home to Mississippi, where a WPA publicity job had her crisscrossing the state's poorest counties with a camera, documenting sharecroppers and county fairs in images she considered practice for the fiction to come. She lived nearly her entire life in the same Jackson house her parents built, never marrying, writing at a desk by the window.

Katherine Anne Porter, an early champion, wrote the introduction to her first story collection and remained a lifelong friend and mentor. Recognition came steadily rather than suddenly: the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter in 1973, decades after her debut, followed by the National Book Award for her collected stories and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She died in 2001 at ninety-two, in the house that is now a museum of her life.