The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
by Katherine Anne Porter
Summary
Porter published very little and discarded most of what she wrote, and this is the whole of it: twenty six stories, gathered from three earlier books plus four that had never been collected, and she said it contained every story she ever finished and published.
Three of them are the reason to start here. Pale Horse, Pale Rider puts Miranda, a young newspaperwoman in Denver in 1918, in love with a soldier waiting to ship out, and then gives her the influenza that killed more people than the war did. Porter caught it herself, was not expected to live, and called the story nearly pure autobiography. Noon Wine is a Texas farm, a silent hired man who plays one tune on a harmonica, and the stranger who comes looking for him, and it does in fifty pages what most novels cannot. Flowering Judas leaves Laura, an American schoolteacher, standing in a revolutionary Mexico she can neither commit to nor leave.
Around those: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, a dying woman's consciousness closing down; the Miranda sequence of Southern childhood, Old Mortality and The Grave; and The Leaning Tower, an American in Berlin in 1931 noticing what his landlady says.
The prose is exact and cool and gives almost nothing away. Nothing is explained, the important sentence is often the plainest one on the page, and these stories reward rereading more than almost any in American fiction.
Around five hundred pages, and best taken a few at a time.
Best for readers who want the short story at full strength and do not need to be told what to feel.
Historical Context & Significance
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter won both the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1966 National Book Award. It works as a career retrospective: she was in her mid seventies when it appeared and had been publishing since the 1920s.
She was famously slow. Ship of Fools, her only novel, took more than twenty years and arrived in 1962 as the bestselling American book of the year, filmed by Stanley Kramer in 1965 with Vivien Leigh in her last screen role. Critics have generally held that the stories rather than the novel are the achievement, and this volume is where that argument was settled.
Porter also built a good deal of her own legend, presenting a genteel Southern past in place of the poor childhood she actually had in Indian Creek, Texas. She died in 1980 at ninety, and her papers went to the University of Maryland. Noon Wine and Pale Horse, Pale Rider are still taught as models of the short novel.