Stories, Essays, and Memoir presents all of Welty's collected short stories. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path" and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr and John James Audubon appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. The Golden Apples (1949), her favorite of her books, is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of fictional Morgana, Mississippi. The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955) has stories set in the South, and in Europe, based on her travels. Two stories from the 1960s include "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", based on the Medgar Evers shooting. One Writer's Beginnings (1984) is Welty's sensitive memoir of her Jackson childhood. A selection of essays and occasional pieces rounds out this volume. A companion volume collects Welty's complete novels.

Complete Novels gathers, for the first time in one volume, all of Welty's longer fiction. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942) legendary figures from Mississippi's past mingle with Welty's own imaginings in an exuberant fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946) vividly portrays the complexities of family relationships set against the backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s. Edna Earle Ponder's unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue shows Welty's humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1953). The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Welty's imaginative gifts to the largest canvas of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor. This volume concludes with The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman coming to terms with her father's death, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972. A companion volume is devoted to Welty's short stories, essays, and autobiography.