Flowering Judas (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Porter was born Callie Russell Porter on May 15, 1890, in a two-room log cabin in the Texas frontier community of Indian Creek. Porter’s mother died when she was two and her father brought his five children to live with his mother, Catherine Anne. Later, Porter took her grandmother’s name. When the grandmother died in 1901 the family suffered from emotional and financial instability. Porter and her sister helped support the family by giving singing and acting lessons, and she aspired to be an actress.

After the family resettled in San Antonio, Porter attended a private Methodist school for two years, which comprised her only formal education. The Porters were Methodists, though Porter later claimed that she had been raised Catholic. She converted to Catholicism upon her marriage, at age sixteen, to a Catholic man.

Porter was a free spirit who defied convention. At age 25 she left her husband and set out to pursue an acting career. She worked at a movie studio in Chicago and as a traveling singer-dancer in Louisiana. Her life’s course took an important turn in 1918 when she became seriously ill with influenza and nearly died. She reevaluated her goals and emerged with a new aspiration to be a writer. She found work as a reporter in Denver and then moved to New York City where she met a group of young Mexican artists and revolutionaries. In 1920 she went to Mexico City to witness the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and to gather material for her fiction. The first short story she published in 1922, “Maria Conception,” was set in Mexico and inspired by events she observed during this visit.

In 1930 Porter published Flowering Judas and Other Stories, the work that established her critical reputation. The following year she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed her to return to Mexico and then to travel extensively in Europe. She continued to write, working on short stories, a biography, and a novel, but published only sporadically, often distracted by love affairs, politics, and illness. She returned to the United States and continued to live a nomadic life, traveling from one teaching position to another. Her next several books of short stories, Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Leaning Tower solidified her reputation as a masterful stylist. With her 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, she became a best-selling author. In 1966 she received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her Collected Stories.

Porter was a beautiful, charismatic woman with a tendency toward self- dramatization. Though she lived an exceptionally independent life for a woman of her generation, she was at times paralyzed by a chaotic personal life. She had numerous lovers and married four times, twice to men far younger than she. Despite her success as a writer, she remained insecure about her lack of education and poor Texas upbringing. Some facts of her biography remain uncertain because Porter was evasive about many aspects of her life and misleading about others. She died in 1980 at age ninety.