Writer Eudora Welty devoted the bulk of her novels and short stories to portraying her native South, and the originality of her work has led several critics to rank her with such southern literary giants of the twentieth century as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. One observer has suggested that only other southerners can fully appreciate Welty's command of local idiom and her painstaking attention to time and place. According to one admirer, however, she demonstrates "that the deeper one goes into the heart of a region the more one transcends its . . . boundaries."

Among Welty's best-known works are The Ponder Heart, which earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters' prestigious William Dean Howells Medal in 1955, and The Optimist's Daughter, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Both residents of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty and the artist who painted her portrait, Mildred Wolfe, knew each other for many years. The writer posed for the likeness seated in her own living room and in her favorite chair. Upon the picture's completion, Wolfe believed that she had recorded the dignity of her subject and at the same time captured "a hint" of Welty's quietly humorous nature.