Porter, Katherine Anne

Porter, Katherine Anne (1890–1980), born in Texas of a family with a long Southern heritage, was educated in convent and private schools. She later traveled widely, and the settings for her fiction, in addition to her native state, include Mexico, where she lived for some time, and Germany, where she resided more briefly. France, where she lived during her first marriage, presumably did not affect her literary career, except that she translated an old French Song‐Book (1933). Her early stories, published as Flowering Judas (1930), immediately won her a critical reputation as a pure stylist who handled complex subjects with economy while penetrating the psychology of characters with great subtlety. Hacienda (1934) and Noon Wine (1937) are stories of intense emotions, the former being set in Mexico and concerned with the making of a film by the Soviet cinema director Eisenstein, the latter set on a Texas farm and dealing with a homicidal maniac. Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) incorporates Noon Wine with two other long stories, Old Mortality and the title piece, about a girl's love for a soldier who dies in an epidemic during World War I. Stories were also gathered in The Leaning Tower (1944) and Collected Stories (1965). The Days Before (1952) collects personal essays, articles, and book reviews. In 1962 appeared the long awaited novel Ship of Fools, a moral allegory about the voyage of life and, according to the author, the way in which “evil is always done with the collusion of good,” treated by means of presenting a variety of people—most of them Germans on the eve of Hitler's accession—as they travel on the Vera, a passenger freighter, from Mexico to Germany during 27 days of 1931. Her life work as a creator of stories was recognized by both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1966. In 1977 she published a brief memoir, The Never‐Ending Wrong, about her protests during the Sacco‐Vanzetti case. Her Letters (1990) appeared next.