Welty wrote during an era in literary history sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. In this period between World War I and II, Southern writers reflected on the history of the South with increasing objectivity and curiosity. Some writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, sought to celebrate the antebellum South and looked back on the era of big plantations, slavery, and the Confederacy with nostalgia. Her novel Gone with the Wind (1936) portrays an aristocratic Southern family victimized by the Union Army and Reconstruction, and focuses more on a love story than the tense sociopolitical reality of the South at that time.

Other Southern writers approached the South in more complex terms. William Faulkner, a Mississippi native like Welty, immortalized the state with a series of novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County; noteworthy novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner wrote in a varied style that was eloquent, dramatic, highly descriptive, and punctuated by bits of rough humor. His characters—white, Black, and mixed race—are complicated individuals who struggle against the dark legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and familial decay. They are portrayed much like characters in Greek tragedies and epics, with flaws and nuance that lends them great complexity.