Discussion Topics
What typically southern values predominate in Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories?
Discuss the theme of betrayal in “Flowering Judas.”
What “old order” do the stories of The Old Order reflect?
Discuss the tension between the demands of civil law and individual conscience in Noon Wine.
Is Porter’s Ship of Fools in effect a “moral allegory” similar to that of Sebastian Brant?
By what techniques does Porter seek to unify the novel Ship of Fools with its many diverse minor characters? Is she successful in the attempt?
Other Literary Forms
Katherine Anne Porter wrote, in addition to short stories, one novel, Ship of Fools (1962), parts of which were published separately from 1947 to 1959, in such magazines and journals as The Sewanee Review, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle. She wrote essays of various kinds, some of which she published under the title of one of them, The Days Before (1952); these included critical analyses of Thomas Hardy’s fiction and biographical studies of Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. Porter was a reporter with unsigned journalism for the Fort Worth weekly newspaper The Critic in 1917 and the Denver Rocky Mountain News in 1918-1919. Early in her career, she worked on a critical biography of Cotton Mather, which she never finished; she did, however, publish parts in 1934, 1940, 1942, and 1946. Her few poems and most of her nonfictional prose have been collected in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1970) under the following headings: “Critical,” “Personal and Particular,” “Biographical,” “Cotton Mather,” “Mexican,” “On Writing,” and “Poems.” In 1967, she composed A Christmas Story, a personal reminiscence of her niece, who had died in 1919. Her memoir of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, The Never-Ending Wrong, was published in 1977 on the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths. She was a prodigious writer of personal letters; many have been published, first, by her friend Glenway Wescott, as The Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), and later by another friend, Isabel Bayley, as Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990).
Achievements
Katherine Anne Porter is distinguished by her small literary production of exquisitely composed and highly praised short fiction. Although she lived to be ninety years old, she produced and published only some twenty-five short stories and one long novel. Nevertheless, her work was praised early and often from the start of her career; some of her stories, such as “Flowering Judas,” “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and “Old Mortality,” have been hailed as masterpieces. Sponsored by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Porter won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 and went to Berlin and Paris to live while she wrote such stories as “The Cracked Looking-Glass” and “Noon Wine,” for which she won a Book-of-the-Month Club award in 1937. After publication of the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels in 1939, she received a gold medal for literature from the Society of Libraries of New York University, in 1940. Elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943, Porter was also appointed as writer-in-residence at Stanford University in 1949, and, in the same year, she received an honorary degree, doctor of letters, from the University of North Carolina. Such awards and honors continued, with writer-in-residence appointments at the University of Michigan in 1954 and the University of Virginia in 1958, honorary degrees at the University of Michigan, Smith College, and La Salle College. In 1959, she received a Ford Foundation grant, in 1962 the Emerson-Thoreau gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1966-1967, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the Gold Medal for fiction, National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Other literary forms
Katherine Anne Porter is best known for her...
(This entire section contains 57 words.)
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short fiction. Her stories appear inFlowering Judas, and Other Stories (1930), The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories (1944), and The Old Order (1944) and were gathered in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Criticism, essays, and poems were collected in The Days Before (1952) and The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1970).
Achievements
Katherine Anne Porter’s solid and lasting reputation as a writer is based on a very small output of published work: one novel, a handful of novellas, and fewer than two dozen stories. This slender output, however, represents only a small portion of the fiction she wrote during her lifetime. Exacting and self-critical, she discarded many more stories than she published. By the time her first story appeared in print, she had already developed her fictional techniques to near perfection, and the maturity and craft of her style in Flowering Judas, and Other Stories, her first published collection, never was surpassed by her later fiction.
Porter early established her reputation with literary critics and only later became widely known and read. In 1931, one year after the publication of her first volume, she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award she received again in 1938. The Society of Libraries of New York University awarded her its first annual gold medal for literature in 1940 upon the publication of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. A Modern Library edition of Flowering Judas, and Other Stories appeared that same year. In 1943, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1949, she accepted her first appointment as writer-in-residence and guest lecturer at Stanford University. In later years, she held similar positions in many other colleges and universities, including the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, the University of Liège, and the University of Virginia.
By the time she published Ship of Fools in 1962, Porter had received three more honors: a Ford Foundation grant in 1959, the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1962 for her story “Holiday,” and the Emerson-Thoreau bronze medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ship of Fools became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and an immediate best seller. In the face of its overwhelming popular success, some critics charged that Porter had forsaken her artistic standards in favor of writing a book that would appeal to a large audience. Ship of Fools also was criticized for its pessimism and for its failure to conform neatly to the structure of a novel, a supposed flaw especially irksome to those who had admired the formal perfection of Porter’s earlier works. Porter herself was surprised by the book’s popularity. She had abandoned the form of her earlier work—with its tight plots centered on the fate of a single character—but she had moved deliberately on to something else. She was still writing “honest,” she said, a quality that characterized all her fiction. First and last, she was still an artist, a label she applied to herself unhesitatingly.
Though Porter published no new fiction after Ship of Fools, her critical and public acclaim grew. It reached its peak when she received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in fiction in 1966.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Bloom introduces twelve classic essays, by Robert Penn Warren, Robert B. Heilman, Eudora Welty, and others. The symbolism of “Flowering Judas,” the ambiguities of “He,” and the dreams in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” are focuses of attention. Porter is compared with Flannery O’Connor. Includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic and monologic to Porter’s fiction, Brinkmeyer argues that when she created a memory-based dialogue with her southern past, she achieved her height as an artist, producing such important stories as “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and “Noon Wine.”
Fornataro-Neil, M. K. “Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter.” Twentieth Century Literature 44 (Fall, 1998): 349-361. Discusses “Old Mortality,” “He,” “Noon Wine,” and “Holiday” in terms of Porter’s fascination with characters who cannot or do not speak; claims that her silent characters are alienated because they communicate by a sign system that others cannot understand.
Givner, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Graham, Don. “Katherine Anne Porter’s Journey from Texas to the World.” Southwest Review 84 (1998): 140-153. Argues that because the dominant figure in Texas literary mythology was the heroic cowboy, Porter, who had nothing to say about cowboys in her writing, chose instead to identify herself as southerner.
Hartley, Lodwick, and George Core, eds. Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. A collection of seminal essays, this book includes an interview with Porter in 1963, as well as a personal assessment by Porter’s friend Glenway Wescott. A group of five essays provide general surveys, and another five focus on particular stories, including “The Grave” and “Holiday.” Select bibliography, index.
Hendrick, George. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Twayne, 1965. A biographical sketch precedes studies grouped according to settings from Porter’s life: the first group from Mexico, the second from Texas, and the third from New York and Europe. After a chapter on Ship of Fools, the book surveys Porter’s essays and summarizes major themes. Notes, annotated bibliography, index, and chronology.
Liberman, M. M. Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971. In this study of Porter’s methods and intentions, seven chapters concentrate analyses on Ship of Fools, “Old Mortality,” “Noon Wine,” “María Concepción,” “Flowering Judas,” and “The Leaning Tower.” Chapter 6 examines “people who cannot speak for themselves,” the central characters of “Holiday,” “He,” and “Noon Wine.” Includes notes and an index.
Nance, William L. Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964. An emerging thematic pattern of rejection is found in the early stories, up to “Hacienda.” Variations are illustrated by the middle stories. The Miranda stories are presented as fictional autobiography, and Ship of Fools is closely analyzed as a failure to make a novel out of character sketches. Complemented by a bibliography and index.
Porter, Katherine Anne. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.
Spencer, Virginia, ed. “Flowering Judas”: Katherine Anne Porter. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. A volume in the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts series, this collection of critical discussions of Porter’s most famous story features background material and important essays, from Ray B. West’s influential 1947 discussion of the story to debates about the character of Eugenio as Christ figure.
Stout, Janis. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Chapters on Porter’s background in Texas, her view of politics and art in the 1920’s, her writing and life between the two world wars, and her relationship with the southern agrarians. Also addresses the issue of gender, the problem of genre in Ship of Fools, and the quality of Porter’s “free, intransigent, dissenting mind.” Includes notes and bibliography.
Titus, Mary. The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. A look at the ways in which Porter confronted issues of gender in her work and her life, including a study of some of her unpublished papers.
Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. A comprehensive biography of Porter that offers insight into her turbulent personal life and her writing.
Walsh, Thomas F. Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Chapters on Porter and Mexican politics, her different periods of residence in Mexico, and Ship of Fools. Includes notes and bibliography.
Warren, Robert Penn. “Irony with a Center: Katherine Anne Porter.” In Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1951. In this important early essay on Porter’s stories, Warren asserts Porter’s fiction is characterized by rich surface detail apparently casually scattered and a close structure that makes such detail meaningful.
