Katherine Anne Porter

A novel recounting the lives and actions of the passengers on a ship en route from Mexico to Germany in 1931

Ship of Fools

Selected with an Introduction by Sarah Churchwell 'Porter's stories take accurate and deadly aim . . . dazzling' The New York Times From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.

The Selected Short Stories

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Ten short stories mirror life in the deep South at the turn of the century

Stories of the South from Flowering Judas, Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Leaning Tower

The Old Order

Noon Wine

The Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning volume of writings from the author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider—now combined with little-known works of prose for the very first time Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter “writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, “many are unsurpassed in modern fiction.” The Library of America now reprints the landmark 1965 volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter—which features tales like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and “Flowering Judas”—and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter’s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (LOA #186)

Anthology of the distinguished American author's essays, biographical memoirs and poems on such diverse subjects as Thomas Hardy, marriage, the creative process and Dylan Thomas.

The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter

She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere' A tender story of devotion, resentment and ennui from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

The Cracked Looking-Glass

From notes and letters found among Porter's papers, the editor of this book has recovered and edited 18 unpublished poems. She also includes a critical and biographical essay in which she explains the significance of the poems and looks at the the relationship between Porter's poems and fiction.

Katherine Anne Porter's Poetry

This casebook on "Flowering Judas" addresses Porter's ambivalence surrounding her roles as woman and artist and also attests to the profound influence of Mexico upon her work.

Flowering Judas

The Library of America presents an exclusive e-book edition of the astonishing 1930 collection that introduced a major new voice in American literature. “If Katherine Anne Porter had written nothing but these short narratives," observed the New York Times, "she would be among the most distinguished masters of her craft in this country.”

A Library of America eBook Classic

Flowering Judas and Other Stories

The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories

Twenty-seven short stories by the Pulitizer Prize-winning writer

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

Darlene Harbour Unrue

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) produced a relatively small body of fiction, but she wrote thousands and thousands of letters. The present selection of 135 unexpurgated letters, written to seventy-four different persons, begins with a 1916 letter written from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Texas and ends with a 1979 letter dictated to an unnamed nursing-home attendant in Maryland. Different from any previous selection, this body of letters does not omit Porter's frank criticism of fellow writers and spans her entire life. Within that circumscription is the chronicle of Porter, a twentieth-century woman searching for love while she struggles to become the writer she is sure she can be. Porter's letters vividly showcase the twentieth century as the writer observes it from her historical vantage points--tuberculosis sanatoria and the influenza pandemic of 1918; the leftist community in Greenwich Village in the 1920s; the Mexican cultural revolution of the 1920s and early 1930s; the expatriate community in Paris in the 1930s; the rise of Nazism in Europe between the World Wars; the Second World War and its concomitant suppression of civil liberties; Hollywood and the university circuit as a haven for financially strapped writers in the 1940s and 1950s; the Cold War and its competition for supremacy in space; the Women's Rights and the Civil Rights movements; and the evolution and demise of literary modernism.

Chronicles of a Modern Woman

Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

Selected letters between Porter and fellow writers trace her development as a writer and reveal her outlook on life

Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

Thomas Francis Walsh

Ruth M. Alvarez

This volume brings together 29 pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appear in her collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Includes both fiction and essays.

Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter

Between 1920 and 1958 Katherine Anne Porter published more than sixty-five book review, many of which are now largely inaccessible. Although several such pieces have appeared in earlier collections of Porter's nonfiction writings, never have so many of Porter's reviews--nearly fifty--been made available in a single volume. Collectively the review reveal Porter's opinions on topics ranging from the nature of art and the place of the artist in politics and society to feminism and the role of female artists. Particularly evident in the reviews are the critical principles that guided her own work as well as her judgments of the works of other writers. In her introductory essay Darlene Harbour Unrue provides important biographical information on Porter, traces her career as a reviewer, and links critical assumptions in the reviews to the themes and techniques of Porter's fiction. Other scholars as well have regarded Porter's critical reviews as valuable tools both for analyzing the fiction and for constructing a portrait of Porter the artist, primarily because Porter produced so little fiction (three collections of short stories and novellas, Flowering Judas, The Leaning Tower, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and a novel, Ship of Fools). In the preface to the first collection of her nonfiction writings, The Days Before, Porter herself urged readers to look closely at her nonfiction, for there they would discover "the shape, direction, and connective tissue of a continuous, central interest and preoccupation of a lifetime." Most of the reviews--which appeared in such publications as the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Nation, and New Masses--she apparently undertook for financial reasons, but occasionally she would agree to review a friend's latest offering. She published no reviews after the success of her best-selling novel, Ship of Fools. Porter's scope as a reviewer was impressively broad. Because she lived in Mexico City during the revolution, had known Diego Rivera, and had studied "primitive" Mexican art, she was often called on to review books on Mexican art and on the revolution. Porter also reviewed many books by or about women. Her reviews of the Short Novels of Colette and Katharine Anthony's translation of Catherine the Great's memoirs are particularly noteworthy for her comments about women artists and her expression of admiration for women who flout traditional roles. These collected reviews illustrate the evolution of one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and will interest not only Porter scholars but also anyone who appreciates her fiction.

This Strange, Old World and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter

A collection of short works includes speeches, essays, and such stories as "Flowering Judas," "Noon Wine," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," and "The Days Before."

Collected Stories and Other Writings

Mae M. Franking

"My Chinese Marriage" by Mae M. Franking, Katherine Anne Porter. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

My Chinese Marriage

Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter ?writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.? Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, ?many are unsurpassed in modern fiction,? and when gathered in one volume in 1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter?s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography.

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings

Published in 1939, this landmark collection of three short novels, now available in an exclusive Library of America e-book edition, elevated Katherine Anne Porter, in the words of one contemporary reviewer, “into the illustrious company headed by Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry James.”

Katherine Anne Porter

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