This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green demonstrate defiance of the tyranny of actuality, and illustrate Welty’s shuttling between actuality and abstraction. It also shows the early orientation of Welty’s artistic prejudices, which would guide her during much of her career. Over the years, Welty’s view of imaginative transformation and the strategies required to realize the principle would develop and intensify, but in this first volume of short stories she holds to her fundamental conviction that fiction’s point of view should glow, illuminating the surreality of the waking life in dream and vice versa.