Welty wrote the novel as a challenge to herself. In an interview for The Paris Review, she said:
I wanted to see if I could do something that was new for me: translating every thought and feeling into action and speech, speech being another form of action—to bring the whole life of it off through the completed gesture, so to speak. I felt that I’d been writing too much by way of description, of introspection on the part of my characters. I tried to see if I could make everything shown, brought forth, without benefit of the author’s telling any more about what was going on inside the characters’ minds and hearts. For me, this makes almost certainly for comedy—which I love to write best of all. Now I see it might be a transition toward writing a play.[2]
Welty set the novel in the 1930s because she wanted to write about "a family who had nothing" and the Depression provided that opportunity.[2] Originally, she had not planned to write a novel; in the Paris Review interview she said, "I’m a short-story writer who writes novels the hard way, and by accident".[2]
The novel's first edition was published on Welty's 61st birthday.[1]
