Eudora Welty's most famous novel is Delta Wedding. The novel takes places in the 1920s because, according to the author, that was the only time period in 20th Century American history when many of the men were not away at some war or manning some flood in the Delta region of the Mississippi. That way, "all the men could be at home and uninvolved," Welty said. The author also picked the year 1923 to set her story in because that was the time when she was a little girl and thus the time she believed was the best time to have a child. Welty also picked the year 1923 to begin Delta Wedding because she learned by reading the almanac that that was a period "that was uneventful and that [allowed] her to concentrate on the people without any undue outside influences."
Delta Wedding is a story about a large family, the Fairchilds. Mr. Fairchild's first name is Battle, his wife's name is Ellen; the two had eight children together, and those children have more than a dozen aunts, uncles and cousins who either live in nearby family homes or have collected in town for the wedding, with their collection of Negro servants. The clan lives in the Mississippi Delta, which is the only geographical and psychological boundary that the Fairchild family ever experiences in Welty's book. The place which the author describes is very important because, for Welty, the place serves as an actual physical construct, much like an embracing architectural shape, within which everything occurs. One writer thought that, in Eudora Welty's works, the place was not just the location in which a novel occurred but that it was essential in developing the identities of her characters, whether in terms of "retreat from civilization, estrangement, legend [or for establishing] real history."
In Delta Wedding, both the small town and the big home which the Fairchilds reside in are significant because they confine the characters to the mundane tasks which defin...