This realization -- that one door opening might mean another one closing forever -- might stand as a metaphor for Eudora Welty's entire career. When she wrote "The Winds," Welty was 32, and had just sold her first book. Around the same time she confided to her friend and mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, that she was still a virgin. "And you always will be," Porter replied.

Porter may have been right. That door may never have opened for Eudora Welty the woman. But whether it did or not, another door -- one that leads into a strange and beautiful imaginative world -- opened for Eudora Welty the writer.

Today, April 13, 1999, is Eudora Welty's 90th birthday. In some minds the question of America's greatest living short story writer's virginity is still worth wondering about, made all the more tantalizing by Welty's famed, lifelong silence on the details of her private life. It's not just prurient interest that drives curiosity about Eudora Welty (though in this age of confession prurience is hard to escape). How, one might ask, could an unmarried, childless woman who spent her entire life living in the home of her parents, who acknowledges having lived "a sheltered life," have known so much about life? That she did is undeniable. Many qualities have gained Welty her exemplary standing in American fiction -- her perfect pitch for Southern dialect and culture; her comic, satirical extravagance; her range of tone and form; her experimentation with folklore and myth -- but it is her exploration of the gift and burden of aloneness, what Welty has termed the "human mystery," that keeps her work so vital. Yet Welty is herself, deliberately, something of a human mystery.

"I'd rather you didn't talk to her" was Welty's ladylike directive to her friends and colleagues, according to Ann Waldron, author of the one and only biography of Welty ("Eudora, A Writer's Life," Doubleday), released this year. It's not that Welty has had nothing to say about her life -- she has, in fact, said plenty, submitting graciously to countless interviews over the years and publishing her own bestselling memoir of her early life, "One Writer's Beginnings," in 1984. One of the oft-repeated stories about Welty as a child is that she would appear in the room when her mother's friends would come to the house to visit, commanding them, "Now, talk." Though she remembers riding her bicycle around the rotunda of the state Capitol in the city where she has spent virtually her entire life, Welty has said that she sometimes felt like an outsider in the South, an observer whose ancestral home did not burn during Sherman's March -- her West Virginian mother and Ohioan father, both schoolteachers, settled in Jackson as newlyweds. It's well known that Welty traces her aspiration to be a writer to her brief stint as a reporter for the WPA during the Depression, which gave her the opportunity to travel all over Mississippi for the first time, interviewing and photographing people of all social classes in their everyday lives.

Welty is even on record about her conflicting feelings of guilt and loyalty toward her mother, with whom she lived for 57 years. In her memoir, Welty recalled her mother's puzzlement over Welty fighting with her younger brothers -- "I don't understand where you children get it," Chestina Welty had said. "I never lose my temper. I just get hurt." "But that was it," Eudora wrote. "A child has no greater burden to bear than a mother who 'just gets hurt.'" She transformed her sorrow over the deaths of both parents into her last novel, "The Optimist's Daughter," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But Welty has always carefully steered interviewers away from questions about her marital status, family affairs and sexuality, insisting politely that certain subjects are simply private. (Asked by one questioner why she never married, she replied, "I wasn't brought up to answer questions like that. And I don't think you were, either.")

Welty's biographer, however, suffers from no such scruples. Waldron is endlessly fascinated by the nature of Welty's relationship with her "adored" friend John Robinson, to whom Welty dedicated the novel "Delta Wedding" and who was perhaps the only man with whom she may have had a romantic attachment, though he is known to have been homosexual. Waldron also suggests -- without offering any evidence -- that Welty's devoted friendship with sexually predatory writer Elizabeth Bowen may have been more than platonic. But the most tiresome and offensive of Waldron's speculations is her insinuation that despite her infectiously charming personality, it was Welty's "ugliness" -- which Waldron greatly exaggerates, if photographs can be trusted -- that prevented her from attracting a romantic partner. No doubt this type of personal intrusion is exactly what Welty hoped to protect herself from by discouraging biographers.

Flawed, unfounded or silly as many of Waldron's personal analyses of Welty may be (for example, there are several catalogs of the details of minor social events that end meaningfully, "but Eudora didn't attend"), hers is the only work to gather so much of the vast trove of secondary sources -- letters, interviews and various other papers -- together in one volume, and for this reason alone it is indispensable for students of Welty. It is worthwhile to consider, for instance, Welty's comment about "hurt" mothers and her own guilt within a broadened context of information: Waldron notes that several of Welty's early, unpublished stories deal with protagonists trying to escape from powerful mothers; that Chestina Welty had breast surgery for a malignant tumor on the night before young Eudora's piano recital but didn't tell her daughter for fear she "wouldn't do herself justice"; that Welty's love of travel led to her mother's cutting comment shortly before her death, "I'll be right back -- when you die, those words ought to be engraved on your lips -- 'I'll be right back.'"

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