Tyler Welty

 Anne Tyler ('the best line-and-length novelist in the world,' in Nick Hornby's cricket-related assessment) was recently on Desert Island Discs, and was, as you'd expect, one of the more rewarding guests of recent times. In the course of the interview, she recalled that she was inspired to be a writer – or, rather, convinced that she could be one – by reading Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. Naturally I made a mental note and sought out The Golden Apples online.
  I had previously read one or two short stories by Welty, and her last novel, The Optimist's Daughter, which I greatly enjoyed (but don't seem to have written about here). The Golden Apples is a collection of interlinked short stories published in 1949 and set in the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi, and, in its portrayal of a small town and its people, it has been likened to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. However, Eudora Welty is emphatically a Southern writer, whose tone and style are very different from Anderson's. As a contemporary review of The Golden Apples put it, 'I doubt that a better book about "the South" – one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern – has ever been written.' I doubt it too – and, on the strength of what I've read so far, I doubt that there have been many better short story collections published since the war. I have read four of the seven stories so far, and two of them – 'June Recital' and 'Moon Lake' – I would describe as masterpieces. I believe a third might be waiting for me when I resume reading (I'm pausing to digest – Welty is rich fare) – 'The Wanderers', which was Welty's own favourite of all her stories.
  I'm sure my American readers will know all about Welty, but she is relatively unknown over here, and I'm glad to have finally discovered her, or rather to have discovered just how good she could be. All thanks to Anne Tyler – who, I was interested to discover, has also told interviewers that it was another Eudora Welty collection, The Wide Net (1943), that awakened her, when she was a 14-year-old girl browsing in the public library: it 'showed her that very small things are often really larger than large things'. Tyler continued to admire Welty, and the admiration was mutual: Eudora Welty said of the last sentence of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Tyler's masterpiece), 'If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!' For the record, that sentence is 'And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.'