Snowdie has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite.

Eudora Alice Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and attended the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. She set most of her short stories and novels in the American South, where she was raised, exquisitely capturing the quotidien life of people from all social classes . A photographer as well, Welty's photographs from the Great Depression formed the basis for several of her short stories. Amongst her many awards, Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel The Optimist's Daughter and in 1996 received the French Legion d'Honneur. By the time of her death, at the age of 92, Welty had established herself as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.