SALISBURY POST

No matter when Eudora Welty died, it would have been too soon. She was a family treasure, the family in this case being generations of readers around the world who delighted in the quirky-funny characters she gave us in short stories such as “Why I live at the P.O.” and novels such as ”The Ponder Heart.”

Welty, who died of pneumonia Monday at 92, is inevitably described as a Southern writer, in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But hers was a different South. She didn’t view the region through a Gothic overlay or brood upon the haunted landscape of a lost cause. Instead, she brought a sharp-eyed gentility to her observations of small-town folk who lived simple but richly layered lives. She found humor and pathos in characters that were sometimes eccentric, sometimes sad, but always profoundly human.

In her life and art, Welty was an original who shunned affectation and falseness. She spent most of her life in Jackson, Miss., in the childhood home that was as sturdy and straightforward as her prose. She was laid to rest in her hometown today — gone too soon, yet with us still in her stories and novels and in the influence she exerted on American literature and legions of writers.