Welty was not the aged and cloistered spinster scrawling out her crystalline fiction in the dark recesses of her Southern Gothic existence. In fact, in a period of eight years in the 1980s she was too often on the road and maintaining her vast network of friends and fellow writers to write much more than autobiographical pieces. Marrs, (English, Millsaps College), a distinguished Welty scholar and personal friend of the author, gently clears up these and other misperceptions about one of the pillars of twentieth-century American fiction. Marrs was given access to letters to and from Welty's two great loves of her life, and correspondence with no less than Katherine Anne Porter, E.M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen, showing that Welty was fascinated by people and their thoughts, the varieties of life around her, and the literary world. The result is upbeat, positive, and affectionate. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)