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Katherine Anne Porter

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Katherine Ann Porter (15 May 1890 - 18 September 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer and novelist and political actitivist. Known for her penetrating insight, her works deal with such dark themes as betrayal and the origin of human evil.

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Biography

Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, the fourth of five children of Harrison Boone Porter and Alice (Jones) Porter. She claimed to be the great-granddaughter of legendary American frontiersman Daniel Boone.

After her mother's death (two months after giving birth to her last child) in 1892, when Porter was two, her 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.

After her grandmother's death, when Porter was 11, 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 the age of 16, she ran off and married John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy Texas ranching family, and subsequently converted to their religion, Roman Catholicism. Her husband was physically abusive - once while drunk, he threw her down the stairs, breaking her ankle. On another drunken occasion he beat her to unconsciousness with a hairbrush.

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, divorcing Koontz in 1915. As part of her divorce decree, 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 sanatoriums, where she decided to become a writer. 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. She almost died there that year during the influenza pandemic (the Spanish flu). This experience provided the background for her critically acclaimed book Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

In 1919, she moved to Greenwich Village, 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, she 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, she traveled back and forth between Mexico and New York City and began publishing short stories and essays. In 1930, she published her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories. It received such critical acclaim that it alone virtually assured her place in American literature.

In 1926, she married Ernest Stock and lived briefly in Connecticut before divorcing him in 1927. She suffered several miscarriages and at least one stillbirth between 1910 and 1926, and after contracting gonorrhea from Stock, she had a hysterectomy in 1927, ending her hopes of ever having a child. As she once confided to a friend, "I have lost children in all the ways one can."

During the 1930s, she spent several years in Europe during which she continued to publish short stories. In 1930, she married Eugene Pressley, a writer 13 years her junior. In 1938, upon returning from Europe, she divorced Pressley and married Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., a graduate student who was 20 years younger. He reportedly divorced her (in 1942) after disovering her real age. She never remarried.

Between 1948 and 1958, Porter taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan 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"; its success finally made her financially secure (she reportedly sold the film rights for $400,000).

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.

She died in Silver Springs, Maryland on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90, and was buried next to her mother in the Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.

Porter had published only 32 poems.

Quotes

Awards and honors

Works

Short Stories and Collections

Long Stories/Short Novels

Novel

Essays

External links

 

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