PORTER, Katherine Anne

(b. 15 May 1890 in Indian Creek, Texas; d. 18 September 1980 in Silver Spring, Maryland), prize-winning short-story writer and novelist who was in the forefront of the "women's literature" of the 1960s.

Born Callie Russell, Porter was the fourth of five children of Harrison Boone Porter, a farmer, and Mary Alice Jones Porter (who died when Porter was nearly two). The children were reared by their grandmother, Catherine Anne Skaggs Porter, until her death in 1901 and then by a cousin near San Antonio, Texas. Through the fictional Miranda Gay, whom Porter identified as her alter ego, Porter implied that the family of her childhood was more genteel, educated, and wealthy than it was.

After her marriage at age sixteen to John Henry Koontz in June 1906, Porter moved to New York City and, with little formal schooling, worked as a journalist and publicist. In 1915 she legally adopted her grandmother's name with a slight change in spelling. After a divorce (1915) and several years in Mexico, Porter finally began her career as a short-story writer in 1922 with "María Concepción." In 1926 she was briefly married to Ernest Stock. In 1931 Porter received a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Germany, and in 1933 she married Eugene Dove Pressly, who worked in the U.S. Consulate in Paris. Porter received another Guggenheim in 1938, the year she was divorced from Pressly. That year she married Albert Erskine, but they, too, divorced, in 1942. She was writer in residence or member of the English faculty at several noted universities and in 1959 became the first female faculty member in the history of Washington and Lee University.

Porter's major works, highly praised short stories and novellas, were written from the 1920s to the 1940s, and she became a major figure in the 1960s as a result of the reassessment of her early works. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and the 1966 National Book Award as well as the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The short stories and novellas had long received the highest critical acclaim. Married and divorced several times, with no children, Porter became a public figure of "women's liberation" and was frequently photographed with a succession of men, often considerably younger than she was. Porter often compared the characters and lives of the women in her stories to her own life and experience. Like Porter herself, Miranda in "Old Mortality" "knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage … with anyone that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries."

Although Porter occasionally commented that she was not sympathetic to all the ideology of modern feminism, many of her women characters are staunch individualists. Most of her female protagonists are hardy survivors, as shown in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," which tells the story of a single woman who raises her children alone in a hostile frontier territory. Similarly, Jenny Brown in Ship of Fools rejects her fiancé because he attacks her sense of self-worth. "Men are continually accusing women of trying to castrate them by insulting their maleness," Porter wrote in 1958. "When a woman loves a man, she builds him up … [but] it is his deepest instinct to destroy, quite often subtly, insidiously, but constantly and endlessly, her very center of being, her confidence in herself as woman." Such themes earned Porter's work a place in the emerging women's studies movement.

A second thread of Porter's work that resonated in the 1960s was the awareness of Mexican culture. As well as growing up in the Southwest and spending time in Mexico, she had met several Mexican artists in Greenwich Village and wrote the story of a Mexican ballet performed in Mexico City in 1923. Porter became deeply immersed in Mexico's culture, especially Aztec and Mayan art and crafts, and was involved in political conflicts, which laid the ground-work for such stories as "Flowering Judas" and "Hacienda." In the late 1920s she fled Mexico when the Mexican government accused her of being a Bolshevik. Porter wrote to the editor of Century in July 1923, "My America has been a borderland of strange tongues and commingled races, and if they are not American, I am fearfully mistaken. And, to my mind, this includes Mexico."

Having also lived in Europe in the 1930s, Porter was aware of increasing tensions between Germany and France. She began working on Ship of Fools in 1945, and several of her characters attack the way the ship's officers and passengers express overt hostility toward the Jewish Germans. In 1946 she wrote, "I believe that human beings are capable of total evil, but no one has ever been totally good, and this gives the edge to evil." Consistent with that viewpoint, Porter said in April 1962 that the novel's point is "that evil is always done with the collusion of good."

The initial response to Ship of Fools (1962) was very positive. Porter wrote in the preface to the novel that the German ship Vera was a "simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity.… I am a passenger on that ship." Although the novel may seem like a pastiche of short stories without a primary character or central plotline, Porter's general focus is on the lesser forms of evil, its pettiness and all-pervasiveness. Even those not actively evil contribute to evil by their tolerance of it or by ignoring it. The novel also observes women at transitional points in their lives: a widow; a political exile, La Condesa; an unattractive young woman travelling with her parents; and two figures comparable to Porter herself, the artist Jenny Brown and an American woman self-exiled to Paris. The novel and its subsequent film (1965) brought Porter critical acclaim and wealth.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Porter continued her journalism, gave interviews, and wrote book reviews. In 1972 Playboy magazine sent her to Cape Canaveral to cover an Apollo moon mission. Her last major publication, The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), was an account of her protest against the verdict in the 1921 Sacco-Vanzetti case. (The political radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts and eventually were executed for their alleged crimes despite conflicting evidence and the confession of another man.) From the late 1970s Porter lived in Maryland, where she died after a series of strokes. Her remains were cremated and buried in a small cemetery in Indian Creek, Texas, beside her mother's grave.

Shortly after Porter's death, the American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote of her in the Saturday Review that she had "created an oeuvre … keenly aware of the depth and darkness of human experience … and thoroughly committed to a quest for meaning in the midst of … ironic complexities." Porter's style is marked by rhetorical beauty and balance; her simple and clear dialogue is appropriate to each speaker. The remarkable range of her fiction reaches from the Mexican landscape to the interior monologue of her character Granny Weatherall. Her focus on independent women in her short stories established Porter as one of the major figures in the rising field of women's literature. Her writing on Mexico, from its crafts to the idiom and lifestyle of its people, is one of the early evocations of the country in American literature. The prizes awarded to her collected short stories, even more than the critical acclaim of Ship of Fools, denoted Porter's acceptance by both academia and the reading public of the 1960s.

Porter's papers are at the McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland and at the Beinecke at Yale. Perhaps the best biography of Porter is Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1991). Darlene Harbour Unrue edited Porter's "This Strange, Old World" and Other Book Reviews (1991), written between 1920 and 1958. See also Enrique Hank Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek (1981) and The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), and Isabel Bayley, ed., Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990). Useful in assessing Porter's impact on the 1960s are Glenway Wescott, "Katherine Anne Porter: The Making of a Novel," Atlantic Monthly 209 (April 1962): 43–49, and "Katherine Anne Porter: The Art of Fiction," an interview by Barbara Thompson in the Paris Review 29 (winter–spring 1963): 87–114. Obituaries are in the Washington Post (10 Sept. 1980), New York Times (19 Sept. 1980), and Newsweek (29 Sept. 1980).

Dessa Crawford