PORTER, Katherine Anne

Nationality: American. Born: Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, 15 May 1890. Education: Thomas School, San Antonio, Texas. Family: Married 1) John Henry Koontz in 1906 (separated 1914; divorced 1915); 2) Ernest Stock in 1925; 3) Eugene Dove Pressly in 1933 (divorced 1938); 4) Albert Russell Erskine, Jr., in 1938 (divorced 1942). Career: Journalist and film extra in Chicago, 1911-14; tuberculosis patient, Dallas and San Angelo, Texas, and New Mexico, 1915-17; worked with tubercular children in Dallas, 1917; staff member, Fort Worth Critic, Texas, 1917-18; reporter, 1918, and drama critic, 1919, Rocky Mountain News, Denver; lived in New York, 1919, and mainly in Mexico, 1920-31, and Europe in 1930s; copy editor, Macauley and Company, publishers, New York, 1928-29; taught at Olivet College, Michigan, 1940; Library of Congress Fellow in Regional American Literature, 1944; contract writer for MGM, Hollywood, 1945-46; lecturer in writing, Stanford University, California, 1948-49; guest lecturer in literature, University of Chicago, Spring 1951; visiting lecturer in contemporary poetry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1953-54; Fulbright lecturer, University of Liège, Belgium, 1954-55; writer-in-residence, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Autumn 1958; Glasgow Professor, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, Spring 1959; lecturer in American literature for U.S. Department of State, in Mexico, 1960, 1964; Ewing Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles, 1960; Regents' Lecturer, University of California, Riverside, 1961. U.S. delegate, International Festival of the Arts, Paris, 1952; member, Commission on Presidential Scholars, 1964; consultant in poetry, Library of Congress, 1965-70. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1931, 1938; New York University Libraries gold medal, 1940; Ford Foundation grant, 1959, 1960; O. Henry award, 1962; Emerson-Thoreau medal, 1962; Pulitzer prize, 1966; National Book award, 1966; American Academy gold medal, 1967; Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award, 1972. D.Litt.: University of North Carolina Woman's College, Greensboro, 1949; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1958; Maryville College, St. Louis, 1968. D.H.L.: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1954; University of Maryland, College Park, 1966; Maryland Institute, 1974. D.F.A.: La Salle College, Philadelphia, 1962. Vice-president, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1950-52. Member: American Academy, 1967. Died: 18 September 1980.

Publications

Collections

Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter. 1993.

Katherine Anne Porter's Poetry. 1996.

Short Stories

Flowering Judas. 1930; augmented edition, as Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1935.

Hacienda: A Story of Mexico. 1934.

Noon Wine (novella). 1937.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (includes Noon Wine and "Old Mortality"). 1939.

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. 1944.

Selected Short Stories. 1945.

The Old Order: Stories of the South. 1955.

A Christmas Story. 1958.

Collected Stories. 1964; augmented edition, 1967.

Novel

Ship of Fools. 1962.

Other

My Chinese Marriage. 1921.

Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts. 1922.

What Price Marriage. 1927.

The Days Before: Collected Essays and Occasional Writings.1952; augmented edition, as The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, 1970.

A Defense of Circe. 1955.

The Never-Ending Wrong (on the Sacco-Vanzetti case). 1977.

Conversations with Porter, Refugee from Indian Creek, with Enrique Hank Lopez. 1981.

Porter: Conversations, edited by Joan Givner. 1987.

Letters, edited by Isabel Bayley. 1990.

The Strange Old World and Other Book Reviews by Porter, edited by Darlene Unrue. 1991.

Translator, French Song-Book. 1933.

Translator, The Itching Parrot, by Fernandez de Lizárdi. 1942.

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Bibliography:

A Bibliography of the Works of Porter and A Bibliography of the Criticism of the Works of Porter by Louise Waldrip and Shirley Ann Bauer, 1969; Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide by Robert F. Kiernan, 1976; Porter: An Annotated Bibliography by Kathryn Hilt and Ruth M. Alvarez, 1990.

Critical Studies:

The Fiction and Criticism of Porter by Harry John Mooney, Jr., 1957, revised edition, 1962; Porter by Ray B. West, Jr., 1963; Porter and the Art of Rejection by William L. Nance, 1964; Porter by George Hendrick, 1965, revised edition, with Willene Hendrick, 1988; Porter: The Regional Sources by Winifred S. Emmons, 1967; Porter: A Critical Symposium edited by Lodwick Hartley and George Core, 1969; Porter's Fiction by M. M. Liberman, 1971; Porter by John Edward Hardy, 1973; Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Robert Penn Warren, 1979; Porter: A Life by Joan Givner, 1982, revised edition, 1991; Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction by Jane Krause DeMouy, 1983; Truth and Vision in Porter's Fiction, 1985, and Understanding Porter, 1988, both by Darlene H. Unrue; The Texas Legacy of Porter by James T. Tanner, 1990; Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, 1993; Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times by Janis P. Stout, 1995; Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue, 1997.

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Katherine Anne Porter's short novels Noon Wine, "Old Mortality," and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" brought her great artistic praise and her long novel Ship of Fools was a commercial success, but much of her best work was in short fiction. She began writing about Mexico, her "familiar country," in her first story "María Concepción" (1922). In that story she showed a complete mastery of form, plunging the reader into the amoral-moral world of the Indian and by extension plumbing the depth of all human existence. As is often the case in her fiction, a strong woman triumphs over a weak man. The two stories that followed—"The Martyr" (1923) and "Virgin Violeta" (1924)—are slight, as is "That Tree"(1934). "Flowering Judas" (1930), also set in Mexico, has been recognized as one of her best stories. She then finished a lost-generation story—"Hacienda" (1932, published as Hacienda: A Story of Mexico, 1934), a thinly disguised account of Sergei Eisenstein's filming of Que Viva Mexico! This story of spiritual, physical, moral, and psychological isolation is one of her most underrated works.

Alienated from Mexican culture, Porter turned to recreating and mythologizing her Southern heritage and her own past in Texas. "The Source" (1941) is the first story in a series called "The Old Order" and is a remarkable sketch of the grandmother's power and control over the family, revealing the grandmother as the source of the strengths and weaknesses of the whole family. The fictional grandmother, based largely on the author's own grandmother Porter who took over the rearing of the Porter children after the death of Katherine Anne Porter's mother, was portrayed as a strong woman married to a weak man. Family history, including the relationships with slaves who in the fictional version remained with the family after they had been freed, was explored in "The Witness" (1944), "The Journey" (1936), and "The Last Leaf" (1944). "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (1929) is a presentation of the grandmother figure, but it is not a Miranda story.

Porter wrote several autobiographic stories in which she appears as the character Miranda: "The Fig Tree" (1960), "The Circus" (1935), "The Grave" (1935), "Old Mortality" (1938), and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1938). In these often-anthologized stories Porter traced the growth of Miranda from early childhood to maturity, from innocence to her initiation into the mysteries of the world. These stories about the family and Miranda, taken together, are equal to the artistic achievement of her two best Mexican stories, "María Concepción" and "Flowering Judas."

Porter, born in poverty into a family that had seen better days before the Civil War, also wrote a series of stories about the rural South she knew as a child—"He" (1927), Noon Wine, and "Holiday" (1960). The first two are tragic stories of Anglo families, and "Holiday," set on the farm of a German family, reflects her loathing of Germans, an attitude shown even more definitively in "The Leaning Tower" (1941) and Ship of Fools. Another story, "Magic" (1928), uses the form of the dramatic monologue, and as Joan Givner, Porter's biographer, has noted, the theme is "the passive promotion of evil by innocent people, which would run through [Porter's] works in a steady, unbroken line until it reached its fullest expression in Ship of Fools." Porter's stories "Rope" (1928), about a failed marriage, "The Downward Path to Wisdom" (1939), based on a childhood memory of Glenway Wescott's, "The Cracked Looking-Glass" (1932), a Joycean-like story, and "A Day's Work" (1940), set among the Irish poor in New York, though interesting, lack the vitality of Porter's best work.

"Theft" (1929) has been one her most explicated stories. The search for love, both profane and sacred, is an important theme in this complex story. The central character is a wasteland figure, an alienated woman left finally without any kind of love. Porter's best stories are marked by a mastery of technique, by honesty, and by an exploration of the human heart and mind and society itself without lapsing into popular clichés. She had developed her fictional techniques by the time she published "María Concepción," and technically she showed little change in the decades that followed. She was a conscious writer, in the tradition of Joyce, James, and Cather. She rightly considered herself an artist: "I'm one of the few living people not afraid to pronounce that word," she said in 1958. Her literary production was not great in volume, but several of her stories are considered by most critics as belonging in that small group called America's best.

—George Hendrick

See the essays on "Flowering Judas" and Noon Wine.