Katherine Anne Porter

Who Was Katherine Anne Porter?

Katherine Anne Porter was one of the finest short story writers in American literature and the author of a body of work so carefully crafted and so slowly produced that her entire published fiction fits into a single volume. Born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890, she grew up in poverty in South Texas and created for herself a background and a persona considerably more genteel than the reality — a habit of self-invention that her fiction both practices and examines.

Her major collections — Flowering Judas (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and The Leaning Tower (1944) — and her single novel Ship of Fools (1962) constitute one of the most technically accomplished bodies of fiction in American literature. Her novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” — set during the 1918 influenza pandemic — is among the finest works of American short fiction.

Porter is significant for TLA because her fiction renders, with unusual precision, the specific form that memory, loss, and the Southern Catholic imagination take in a woman of extraordinary gifts and extraordinary self-deception — and because her work consistently demonstrates that the most honest writing requires the most honest reckoning with oneself.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Flowering Judas and Other Stories — 1930
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider — 1939 — three novellas
• The Leaning Tower and Other Stories — 1944
• Ship of Fools — 1962 — novel
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter — 1965 — Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award