Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter, (b. , May 15,
1890, Indian Creek, Texas, U.S.—d. Sept.
18, 1980, Silver Spring, Md.), American
novelist and short-story writer, a
master stylist whose long short stories
have a richness of texture and
complexity of character delineation
usually achieved only in the novel.
Porter
was educated at private and convent
schools in the South. She worked as a
newspaperwoman in Chicago and in Denver,
Colorado, before leaving in 1920 for
Mexico, the scene of several of her
stories. “Maria Concepcion,” her first
published story (1922), was included in
her first book of stories, Flowering
Judas (1930), which was enlarged in 1935
with other stories.
The
title story of her next collection, Pale
Horse, Pale Rider (1939), is a poignant
tale of youthful romance brutally
thwarted by the young man’s death in the
influenza epidemic of 1919. In it and
the two other stories of the volume,
“Noon Wine” and “Old Mortality,” appears
for the first time her
semiautobiographical heroine, Miranda, a
spirited and independent woman.
Porter’s reputation was firmly
established, but none of her books sold
widely, and she supported herself
primarily through fellowships, by
working occasionally as an uncredited
screenwriter in Hollywood, and by
serving as writer-in-residence at a
succession of colleges and universities.
She published The Leaning Tower (1944),
a collection of stories, and won an O.
Henry Award for her 1962 story,
“Holiday.” The literary world awaited
with great anticipation the appearance
of Porter’s only full-length novel, on
which she had been working since 1941.
With
the publication of Ship of Fools in
1962, Porter won a large readership for
the first time. A best-seller that
became a major film in 1965, it tells of
the ocean voyage of a group of Germans
back to their homeland from Mexico in
1931, on the eve of Hitler’s ascendency.
Porter’s carefully crafted, ironic style
is perfectly suited to the allegorical
exploration of the collusion of good and
evil that is her theme, and the
penetrating psychological insight that
had always marked her work is evident in
the book.
Porter’s Collected Short Stories (1965)
won the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her essays,
articles, and book reviews were
collected in The Days Before (1952;
augmented 1970). Her last work,
published in 1977, when she suffered a
disabling stroke, was The Never-Ending
Wrong, dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti
case of the 1920s.
