It's the end of summer at the beginning of the century, the dark middle of the night on a street and in a house just like the one where Eudora Welty grew up in Jackson, Miss., and a little girl named Josie has been roused from her bed, dressed in the wrong coat and escorted by her parents to a safe room during a tornado. As the storm passes eerily over and her smaller brother yells in his sleep, Josie floats through her dream-life childhood, effortlessly conjuring visions of the season now passing -- toy tattoos of flower baskets and Athenian ruins transferred onto her arms and legs, live June bugs on threads, the fascinating golden-haired teenage neighbor, Cornella, in her high-heeled shoes. The morning after the storm, Josie finds a wet scrap of paper outside -- a torn bit of ardent love letter with Cornella's name scribbled on it, which Josie hides in her "most secret place": Oh my darling I have waited so long ... "For the first time in her life," wrote Welty in "The Winds," a short story published in 1941, "she thought, might the same wonders never come again?"

This realization -- that one door opening might mean another one closing forever -- might stand as a metaphor for Eudora Welty's entire career. When she wrote "The Winds," Welty was 32, and had just sold her first book. Around the same time she confided to her friend and mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, that she was still a virgin. "And you always will be," Porter replied.

Porter may have been right. That door may never have opened for Eudora Welty the woman. But whether it did or not, another door -- one that leads into a strange and beautiful imaginative world -- opened for Eudora Welty the writer.

Today, April 13, 1999, is Eudora Welty's 90th birthday. In some minds the question of America's greatest living short story writer's virginity is still worth wondering about, made all the more tantalizing by Welty's famed, lifelong silence on the details of her private life. It's not just prurient interest that drives curiosity about Eudora Welty (though in this age of confession prurience is hard to escape). How, one might ask, could an unmarried, childless woman who spent her entire life living in the home of her parents, who acknowledges having lived "a sheltered life," have known so much about life? That she did is undeniable. Many qualities have gained Welty her exemplary standing in American fiction -- her perfect pitch for Southern dialect and culture; her comic, satirical extravagance; her range of tone and form; her experimentation with folklore and myth -- but it is her exploration of the gift and burden of aloneness, what Welty has termed the "human mystery," that keeps her work so vital. Yet Welty is herself, deliberately, something of a human mystery.

"I'd rather you didn't talk to her" was Welty's ladylike directive to her friends and colleagues, according to Ann Waldron, author of the one and only biography of Welty ("Eudora, A Writer's Life," Doubleday), released this year. It's not that Welty has had nothing to say about her life -- she has, in fact, said plenty, submitting graciously to countless interviews over the years and publishing her own bestselling memoir of her early life, "One Writer's Beginnings," in 1984. One of the oft-repeated stories about Welty as a child is that she would appear in the room when her mother's friends would come to the house to visit, commanding them, "Now, talk." Though she remembers riding her bicycle around the rotunda of the state Capitol in the city where she has spent virtually her entire life, Welty has said that she sometimes felt like an outsider in the South, an observer whose ancestral home did not burn during Sherman's March -- her West Virginian mother and Ohioan father, both schoolteachers, settled in Jackson as newlyweds. It's well known that Welty traces her aspiration to be a writer to her brief stint as a reporter for the WPA during the Depression, which gave her the opportunity to travel all over Mississippi for the first time, interviewing and photographing people of all social classes in their everyday lives.

Welty is even on record about her conflicting feelings of guilt and loyalty toward her mother, with whom she lived for 57 years. In her memoir, Welty recalled her mother's puzzlement over Welty fighting with her younger brothers -- "I don't understand where you children get it," Chestina Welty had said. "I never lose my temper. I just get hurt." "But that was it," Eudora wrote. "A child has no greater burden to bear than a mother who 'just gets hurt.'" She transformed her sorrow over the deaths of both parents into her last novel, "The Optimist's Daughter," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But Welty has always carefully steered interviewers away from questions about her marital status, family affairs and sexuality, insisting politely that certain subjects are simply private. (Asked by one questioner why she never married, she replied, "I wasn't brought up to answer questions like that. And I don't think you were, either.")

Welty's biographer, however, suffers from no such scruples. Waldron is endlessly fascinated by the nature of Welty's relationship with her "adored" friend John Robinson, to whom Welty dedicated the novel "Delta Wedding" and who was perhaps the only man with whom she may have had a romantic attachment, though he is known to have been homosexual. Waldron also suggests -- without offering any evidence -- that Welty's devoted friendship with sexually predatory writer Elizabeth Bowen may have been more than platonic. But the most tiresome and offensive of Waldron's speculations is her insinuation that despite her infectiously charming personality, it was Welty's "ugliness" -- which Waldron greatly exaggerates, if photographs can be trusted -- that prevented her from attracting a romantic partner. No doubt this type of personal intrusion is exactly what Welty hoped to protect herself from by discouraging biographers.

Flawed, unfounded or silly as many of Waldron's personal analyses of Welty may be (for example, there are several catalogs of the details of minor social events that end meaningfully, "but Eudora didn't attend"), hers is the only work to gather so much of the vast trove of secondary sources -- letters, interviews and various other papers -- together in one volume, and for this reason alone it is indispensable for students of Welty. It is worthwhile to consider, for instance, Welty's comment about "hurt" mothers and her own guilt within a broadened context of information: Waldron notes that several of Welty's early, unpublished stories deal with protagonists trying to escape from powerful mothers; that Chestina Welty had breast surgery for a malignant tumor on the night before young Eudora's piano recital but didn't tell her daughter for fear she "wouldn't do herself justice"; that Welty's love of travel led to her mother's cutting comment shortly before her death, "I'll be right back -- when you die, those words ought to be engraved on your lips -- 'I'll be right back.'"

In fact, Welty's experience of the world was anything but parochial. From her early 20s onward Welty made innumerable trips east, especially to New York, where she was an avid theatergoer and struck up enthusiastic friendships with writers and editors, even working at the New York Times Book Review for a spell. She also lived for a few months in San Francisco (one of the stories in "The Golden Apples" is a veritable walking tour of the city and describes her daily streetcar ride to the beach) and traveled in Europe, the inspiration for many of the stories in "The Bride of the Innisfallen."

But if travel opened Welty's mind, her true subject was always her inner landscape. Welty would not have earned her status in the American canon if she had merely invented traveling salesmen or provincial beauticians or old black grandmothers or little girls dreaming through storms. What distinguishes her fiction is the way she parts a curtain for her characters -- often observers, outsiders, travelers like herself -- allowing them fleeting glimpses of some truth they'll never be able to hold onto. In one of many eloquent soliloquies delivered by a Welty character, an adolescent camper on the cusp of adulthood in the story "Moon Lake" thinks of how pears begin to turn brown as they are eaten: "It's not the flowers that are fleeting," she thinks, "it's the fruits -- it's the time when things are ready that they don't stay."

Welty's legendary powers of observation -- undoubtedly honed during her travels, camera in hand, for the WPA -- were obvious from her first book, "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories." In this strange and affecting collection, Welty laid virtually all of her stylistic and thematic cards on the table: her knife-edged ability to render place, her fascination with journeys, her virtuosity with metaphor and description and her characteristic plot, a meandering, nonlinear story that resolves itself -- or doesn't -- in ways wholly impossible to anticipate. The effect is that of entering an elevator in which a fateful conversation is already taking place -- and your only choice is to get off at your own floor. Most of Welty's best-known stories, including "Why I Live at the P.O.," come from this book, which also displays how acutely she understood the stilted mysteries of relationships between men and women. "Women?" the then-admittedly virginal Welty wrote in "Death of a Traveling Salesman," "He could only remember little rooms within little rooms, like a nest of Chinese paper boxes, and if he thought of one woman he saw the worn loneliness that the furniture of that room seemed built of."

There is nothing of the prudish old maid, nothing innocent, about Welty's fiction. Not only does she not flinch at the most vivid of sexual situations, she exhibits an almost frightening insight into the nuances of sexual conduct and married life. In "Sir Rabbit," a young wife is raped in the woods by a Pan-like character with whose twin boys she once literally rolled in the hay. Another young wife, reuniting with her husband after a year's separation, "slid in her hand and seized hold of him right at the root." In "Music From Spain," a year after a beloved child's death a husband slaps his stunned wife across the breakfast table, "without the least idea why he did it." And in a fantastically pagan, archetypal scene in the novel "Losing Battles," a bride is forced to the ground by her assembled female relatives, who cram her mouth and smear her wedding dress with watermelon.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is the most overtly autobiographical of her books. Written in response to the recent deaths of her mother and younger brother, the book's protagonist is Laurel McKelva Hand, an artist nursing a complicated, long-buried grief. Laurel has returned to her family home to be with her father during his eye surgery, but he dies while convalescing in a New Orleans hospital, leaving Laurel to contend with his selfish, oblivious second wife, her mother's wretched death years before and her widowhood -- Laurel's young husband was killed shortly after their marriage during World War II. As the novel opens, Laurel remarks that "some things don't bear going into"; by book's end, after her father's funeral and an inescapable pull back into memory, Laurel has removed herself from the category of "those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them."

Welty seems to have used "The Optimist's Daughter" to discover for herself the meaning of what had happened in her own life. Laurel's mother, Becky McKelva, is clearly based on Chestina Welty: Like Chestina, Becky missed the West Virginia mountains where she grew up with a widowed mother and five banjo-playing, storytelling brothers. At 15, Chestina had taken her father, whose appendix had ruptured, by river raft and then train to Baltimore, where he died; Becky makes the same terrible journey. "Your mother died a crazy!" Laurel's stupid stepmother taunts, and Laurel is forced to think back on her mother's angry suffering, described in terms not dissimilar to Chestina Welty's final years, during which Eudora was completely occupied by the needs of her family. Laurel's father's optimism -- a reference to his determined desire for his wife's torments to turn out all right, an unrealistic hope that only caused her mother more frustration and that Laurel cannot easily forgive -- is clarified further in "One Writer's Beginnings," in which Welty recalls her mother labeling her father "an optimist" with a sigh. "You're a good deal of a pessimist, sweetheart," Welty's father replied.

Looking back over her parents' "blunders," Laurel is ultimately freed by disturbing the "old perfection" of the past, despite the losses and regrets that rise to the surface. And yet, knowing how closely linked the emotions, if not the fictionalized events, in this book are to Welty's own life, it's hard to ignore the autobiographical sting of its most sorrowful moment: when Laurel dreams up her dead husband, "wild with the craving for his unlived life," crying out, "I wanted it!" "I tell my innermost secrets through my fiction. It's all there," Welty stated in a late interview. How can one not imagine her, then, weeping like Laurel McKelva Hand "for what happened to life," the voice of her lost love rising with the wind in the night and becoming a roar?

Back in 1943, when what Welty wanted most was to succeed as a writer, she got a fan letter. She had just published her third book, "The Wide Net," in which many of the characters are somehow isolated, cut off from the world; most of the reviews were disheartening, calling her work "puzzling" and "obscure." But a letter came that assured Welty that "You are doing fine. You are doing all right ..." It was signed "Faulkner."

Forty years later, Eudora Welty gave a speech honoring the memory of her fellow Mississippian, whose work she once characterized as "twice as true as life" and whom she admired more than any other writer. "Faulkner sees with the eyes of the artist and can make us see what is here and at the same time through it to the truth about it, the human truth," Welty said. The same could be said of her own work, though her famous modesty would never allow her to say it. Eudora Welty sees with the eyes of an artist, but her vision has always been that of a woman who has lived.