Katherine Anne Porter

Source

• Born: 15 May 1890
• Birthplace: Indian Creek, Texas
• Died: 18 September 1980
• Best Known As: Short story writer and the author of Ship of Fools

Name at birth: Callie Russell Porter

Katherine Anne Porter was an American short-story writer who had her greatest success with her only novel, the allegorical epic Ship of Fools (1962). Raised by her grandmother in Texas and Louisiana, Porter's young life was famously colorful and included three failed marriages, travels in Europe and Mexico and a stint as a journalist. Her first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, was published in 1930 and launched her career as a well-regarded practioner of the form. Her other acclaimed collections include Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) and 1965's The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (winner of the National Book Award).

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Katherine Anne Porter, 1970. (credit: Paul Porter)

(born May 15, 1890, Indian Creek, Texas, U.S. — died Sept. 18, 1980, Silver Spring, Md.) U.S. writer. She worked as a journalist in Chicago and Denver, Colo., before leaving in 1920 for Mexico, the setting of several of her stories. Her collections include Flowering Judas (1930), her first and most popular; Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), a set of three novellas; and Collected Short Stories (1965, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award). Her stories have a richness of texture and complexity of character delineation usually achieved only in the novel. Ship of Fools (1962) is her only novel.

For more information on Katherine Anne Porter, visit Britannica.com.

The works of Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), American writer, were characterized by delicate perceptions and painstaking craftsmanship.

Katherine Anne Porter was born on May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas. She was a descendant of Jonathan Boone, brother of Daniel Boone, and a cousin of O. Henry (Sidney Porter). After the death of her mother in 1892, Porter and her four siblings went to live with their paternal grandmother. After her grandmother died in 1901, Porter was sent to several convent schools in Texas and Louisiana.

In 1906 Porter ran away from school and got married; she was divorced 3 years later. In 1911 she went to Chicago to work on a newspaper. She returned to Texas in 1914 and worked briefly as an entertainer, singing Scottish ballads.

From early childhood Porter had been writing stories, an activity she described as the unifying passion of her life, but her writing career began with hackwork, chiefly book reviews and political articles. In 1917 she joined the staff of the Critic, a Fort Worth weekly newspaper, and in 1918-1919 worked for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She then moved to New York, where she resumed her hackwork, which included some ghost writing. During the 1920s she traveled often to Mexico, wrote articles about the country, and studied art. She also worked on a biography of Cotton Mather (never finished) and did some book reviewing.

Porter's first volume of stories, Flowering Judas (1930), impressed critics with its flawless, unobtrusive style, but the book sold modestly - a fate common to most short-story collections. The title story, a masterpiece, is set in Mexico and turns brilliantly on a character contrast: Braggioni, the fat, sensual, egotistical revolutionary, and Laura, the beautiful, sensitive, sexually frigid idealist who is a mere dilettante in the revolutionary cause. Porter's use of Christian symbolism gives density to this paradoxical study of power and beauty. The title echoes what she described as the theme of her lifetime: self-betrayal in all its forms.

Flowering Judas won a Guggenheim fellowship for Porter to study abroad, and after a brief stay in Mexico she sailed in 1932 from Veracruz to Bremerhaven (which provided the setting for a novel completed 30 years later, Ship of Fools). A second volume of stories, Hacienda (1934), and a short novel, Noon Wine (1937), followed her marriage in 1933 to Eugene Pressly, a member of the U.S. Foreign Service in Paris. After divorcing Pressly, she married Albert Russell Erskine, Jr., whom she divorced in 1942.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1942) consists of three short novels, including Noon Wine. The title work is a bitter, tragic tale of a young woman's love for a World War I soldier who dies of influenza. It further established Porter's place in American literature: the impeccable artist of meager output. The title story of The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), set in Berlin, deals with the menace of Nazism. The Days Before (1952) is a collection of essays, chiefly critical.

Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools (1962), was an immediate best seller but drew mixed reviews. Based on Das Narrenschiff, Sebastian Brant's 15th-century moral allegory, it examines the lives of an international group of voyagers; their human folly thwarts their personal lives and blinds them as well to the incipience of German fascism.

Porter became widely acknowledged outside her native Texas, where she was considered the best author who ever hailed from the state, even supplanting her cousin, the author O. Henry (Texas Monthly, May 1997). Among her many writing honors were a Texas Institute of Letters fiction award for Ship of Fools, and a Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories in 1966.

Porter's early life in Texas fostered a distaste for the lack of rights for women and social injustice had spurred her to leave, and later became entwined in her writings. The state, which still revered cowboys and the old west, for years failed to accord her status. What local critics sometimes dismissed as overly "genteel, " outsiders termed "perfection of form and style" (Texas Monthly, May, 1997).

Porter chose the University of Maryland as site of her personal library, begun with donations of some personal papers (she had received a honorary degree from the university in 1966). In Texas, her childhood home in Kyle was turned into a museum, a smaller structure in reality than her later reminiscences.

But one of the more unusual bits of Porter memorabilia was claimed by the Southwestern Writers Collection at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. It was her typewritten recipe for a "genuine Mole Poblana, " Mexico's "National Dish, " she wrote, with chili and chocolate (Texas Monthly, January 1997). Apparently learned during two years living there, it was a testament to her exciting, nomadic life after her conversion to Catholicism and abandonment of an early, strict Protestant influence during childhood.

Porter died on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her ashes were buried at Indian Creek beside her mother's grave. However, her writing continued to live on. The Letters of Katherine Anne Porter were published a decade later.

Further Reading

There has been very little written about Porter. George Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter (1965), is a competent critical biography. See also Harry John Mooney, The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (1957). Articles of interest can be found in two issues of Texas Monthly (January 1997 and May 1997). Information on the Katherine Anne Porter Library at the University of Maryland can be accessed on the Internet at http://www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/RARE/797hmpgM.html (July 29, 1997). Porter's obituary appeared in the September 19, 1980 edition of the New York Times.

Quotes:

"They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not."

"You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence."

"It is a man's world, and you men can have it."

"There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own."

"Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled."

"A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being."

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Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Awards and honors 3 Works 3.1 Short stories 3.2 Short story collections 3.3 Short Novels 3.4 Novel 3.5 Essays 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Callie Russel Porter, born in Indian Creek, Texas,^[1] was the fourth of five children of Harrison Boone Porter and Alice (Jones) Porter. Her family tree can be traced back to American frontiersman Daniel Boone, and O. Henry was her father's second cousin.^[2]

In 1892, when Porter was two years old, Porter's mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's father took his four surviving children (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas. The depth of her grandmother's influence can be inferred from Porter's later adoption of her name. Her grandmother died while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas.

After her grandmother's death, the family lived in several towns in Texas and Louisiana, staying with relatives or living in rented rooms. She was enrolled in free schools wherever the family was living, and for a year in 1904 she attended the Thomas School, a private Methodist school in San Antonio, Texas. This was her only formal education beyond grammar school.

In 1906, at age sixteen, Porter left home and married John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy Texas ranching family, and subsequently converted to Koontz's religion, Roman Catholicism. Koontz was physically abusive; once while drunk, he threw her down the stairs, breaking her ankle. They divorced three years later.^[2]

In 1914 she escaped to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in movies. She then returned to Texas and worked the small town circuit as an actress and singer. In 1915, she asked that her name be changed to Katherine Anne Porter.

Also in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the following two years in sanatoria, where she decided to become a writer. It was discovered during that time, however, that she had bronchitis, not TB. In 1917, she began writing for the Fort Worth Critic, critiquing dramas, and writing society gossip. In 1918, she wrote for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado. In the same year, Katherine almost died in Denver during the 1918 flu pandemic. When she was discharged from the hospital months later, she was frail and completely bald. When her hair finally grew back, it was white, and remained that color for the rest of her life.^[2] Her experiences during treatment provided the background for her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

In 1919, Porter moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and made her living ghost writing, writing children's stories and doing publicity work for a motion picture company. The year in New York City had a politically radicalizing effect on her, and in 1920, she went to work for a magazine publisher in Mexico, where she became acquainted with members of the Mexican leftist movement, including Diego Rivera.

Eventually, however, Porter became disillusioned with the revolutionary movement and its leaders. During this period, she also became intensely critical of religion and remained so until the last decade of her life when she again embraced the Roman Catholic Church.

Between 1920 and 1930, Porter traveled back and forth between Mexico and New York City and began publishing short stories and essays. Her first published story was "Maria Concepcion" in The Century Magazine.^[2] In 1930, she published her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories. An expanded edition of this collection was published in 1935 and received such critical acclaim that it alone virtually assured her place in American literature.

In 1926, Porter married Ernest Stock and lived briefly in Connecticut before divorcing him in 1927. Some^[who?] suggest that Porter suffered several miscarriages, at least one stillbirth between 1910 and 1926, and an abortion, and after contracting gonorrhea from Stock, that she had a hysterectomy in 1927, ending her hopes of ever having a child. Yet Porter's letters to her lovers suggest that she still intimated her menstruation after this supposed hysterectomy in 1927. As she once confided to a friend, "I have lost children in all the ways one can."^{[citation needed]}

During the 1930s, Porter spent several years in Europe during which she continued to publish short stories. In 1930, she married Eugene Pressley, a writer thirteen years her junior. In 1938, upon returning from Europe, she divorced Pressley and married Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., a graduate student who was twenty years younger. He reportedly divorced her in 1942 after discovering her real age. She never remarried.

Between 1948 and 1958, Porter taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Texas, where her unconventional manner of teaching made her popular with students. In 1962, she published her only novel, Ship of Fools, which was the best-selling novel in America for that year; its success finally gave her financial security (she reportedly sold the film rights for $400,000).

Despite Porter's claim that after the publication of Ship of Fools she would not win any more prizes in America, in 1966 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and that year was also appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1977, Porter published The Never-Ending Wrong, an account of the notorious trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which she had protested fifty years earlier. Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90, and her ashes were buried next to her mother at Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.

Awards and honors

• 1966 — Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories (1965)
• 1966 — National Book Award for The Collected Stories (1965)
• 1967 — Gold Medal Award for Fiction (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
• Three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature
• 2006 — Porter was featured on a United States postage stamp issued 15 May 2006. She was the 22^nd person featured in the Literary Arts commemorative stamp series.^[1][3]

Works

• Collected Stories and Other Writings appeared in the Library of America series in 2008.

Short stories

• "Maria Concepcion", 1922
• "The Martyr", 1923
• "Virgin Violeta", 1924
• "He", 1927
• "Magic", 1928
• "Rope", 1928
• "Theft", 1929
• "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall", 1930 (American film, 1980)
• "The Cracked-Looking-Glass", 1932
• "Hacienda", 1934
• "The Grave", 1934
• "The Downward Path to Wisdom", 1939
• "The Leaning Tower", 1941
• "The Source", 1944
• "The Journey", 1944
• "The Witness", 1944
• "The Circus", 1944 (American film, 1990)
• "The Last Leaf", 1944
• "A Day's Work", 1944
• "The Old Order", 1958
• "The Fig Tree", 1960 (American film, 1987)
• "Holiday", 1960
• "A Christmas Story", 1967

Short story collections

• Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1930
• The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, 1944
• The Old Order: Stories of the South, 1955
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965
• Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America), 2008

Short Novels

^[4]

• Old Mortality, 1937
• Noon Wine, 1937 (American TV, 1966; American TV, 1985)
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939 (British TV, 1964)

Novel

• Ship of Fools, 1962

Essays

• "The Necessary Enemy", 1948
• "The Future is Now", 1950
• "The Days Before", 1952
• "The Never-Ending Wrong", 1977
• "The Charmed Life", 1942
• "David Harrison HTHS", 1992

References

1. ^ ^{a b} United States Postal Service (2006-05-15). "Katherine Anne Porter Stamp Sails Into Post Offices". Press release. http://www.usps.com/communications/news/stamps/2006/sr06_023.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-10. "Acclaimed writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Anne Porter was honored today by the U.S. Postal Service with the issuance of a commemorative postage stamp." 
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Johnston, Laurie (September 19, 1980). "Katherine Anne Porter Dies at 90; Won a Pulitzer for Short Stories". The New York Times. 
3. ^ ed. William J. Gicker (2006). "Katherine Anne Porter 39¢" (print). USA Philatelic 11 (3): 13. 
4. ^ The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1965

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Katherine Anne Porter

• Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Brief biography at Perspectives in American Literature
• Katherine Anne Porter at American Masters (PBS)
• Brief biography at Famous Texans
• Katherine Anne Porter Timeline
• Biography of Katherine Anne Porter at The Literary Encyclopedia (limited access)
• US postage stamp at USPS
• A Tribute Site to Porter's Life, Work, & Legacy (includes an active literary discussion forum)
• Photos of the first edition of Porter's Pulitzer Prize winning book
• Official site of Porter's childhood home in Kyle, TX

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