Eudora Welty was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909 and raised and lived during the hardest part of the Great Depression. During this time, Jackson, Mississippi had not lost it's rural atmosphere. Welty grew up in the old type south she so often evokes in her stories. She attended the Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in English Literature. After graduating at the height of the depression, she was unable to find work in her chosen field. She worked as a part time journalist and copywriter and as a WPA photographer. This later job took her on assignments throughout Mississippi, and she began using these experiences as material for her short stories. .
In using Eudora Welty's story A Worn Path as an example of southern influence, she shows southern influence in many ways. These are Race and Racism, the constant referrals of being referred to as an old Negro woman also, by the mixture of short stories with a mixture of folk material and by the way she shows sympathy to the Negro woman. She, like writers as Faulkner and James Baldwin, shows the strength of the Negro woman. This strength is built around the Negro woman. "Phoenix" is not just a name for a character. Miss Welty presents her as a symbol of strength in the old woman's spirit of endurance. .
Race and Racism in A Worn Path shows a strong Southern influence because much of her writing took place in Mississippi during the 1940's and 1950's which shows its strong southern influence by being called an old Negro woman.
While walking through the woods a dog runs up to her and knocks her in to a ditch. She just lies there like she does not know what to do. Just then the dog's master, a young hunter comes to her aid to pull her out and points his gun in her face, perhaps as a subconscious way of saying I'm white, I am better than you are, you not going to run from me? When she shows no sign of fear the hunter asks her if she was not going to run away from me, are you not afraid of me.