On Writing

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Welty (The Optimist's Daughter; The Golden Apples; One Writer's Beginnings), who died last year, was a master of the short story, of small town eccentricities, of dialogue and place and the messiness of human relationships-she was a writer's writer. Now, seven of her essays about the craft of fiction, taken from 1978's The Eye of the Story, are repackaged together in a little book that marks a welcome break from the myriad how-to-write-a-novel-in-six-weeks guides and good-natured but often ineffectual volumes of creative encouragement. In elegant and insightful investigations, Welty considers Hemingway's moralizing, Virginia Woolf's intellectual use of the senses, the ""lowlier angel"" of setting, the problem of polemical, crusading fiction and the novel as ""an illusion come full circle"" that ""seems to include a good deal of the whole world."" There is some advice to be had-narrative pleasure can arise from authorial obstruction, for example-but by and large this is a book of fond analysis, addressed to the serious reader and dedicated writer.