51�Թ�

Gilchrist said she was comfortable reading William Faulkner and Eudora Welty because their characters spoke in the Southern cadence that was familiar to her.

While his early novels paid fealty to the expansive, twisty prose of Faulkner and the unsettling Southern gothic of O’Connor, his poetry and later novels moved toward the elegiac sentiments and literary precision of Welty.

“Just a great love story,” Welty says of the film before coming across her “favorite movie of all time,” Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Place is what sets your characters to scale,” Welty once said.

He credits Welty with transforming him in one simple sentence.