Ship of Fools (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter on May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas, the daughter of Harrison and Mary Alice Jones Porter. Porter's mother died in 1892, and the family moved to Kyle, Texas, to live with Porter's grandmother. In 1901, the grandmother died and the family moved to San Antonio.

Porter married John Henry Koontz, a railway clerk, at the age of sixteen; she left him after seven years and was divorced in 1915. Also in that year, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent two years in sanatoriums. In 1917, Porter began her journalism career, writing for the Critic, a weekly newspaper in Fort Wayne, Texas. The following year she wrote for Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She also caught influenza and was dangerously ill.

In 1919, Porter moved to New York, where she worked for a motion picture magazine and wrote children's stories. In the early 1920s, she traveled twice to Mexico, where she studied Mexican art. Returning to New York in 1922, she wrote her first mature story, "Maria Concepción." In 1930, her first book, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, which included the well-known story, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," was published.

From 1931 to 1932, Porter sailed from Mexico to Europe, where she lived in Berlin and traveled around Europe. In 1939, her volume of stories, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, was published; The Leaning Tower and Other Stories followed in 1944.

From 1949 to 1962, Porter lectured at various institutions, including Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia. Her unorthodox teaching style made her popular with the students. In 1952, she published a collection of essays, The Days Before, and her only novel, Ship of Fools, which she had been working on for twenty years, followed in 1962.

In 1966, Porter received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her Collected Stories, which had been published the previous year. Her final publication was The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), a reminiscence of the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s.

Porter married Ernest Stock in 1926, but they were divorced within a few years. In 1933, she married for the third time, to Eugene Pressly, and that marriage also ended in divorce, in 1938. In the same year, Porter married Albert Erskine Jr.; they were divorced in 1942.

Porter died on September 18, 1980, in Silver Springs, Maryland.