Katherine Anne Porter was a master of the short story. Despite the shortness of her stories, she has very well developed characters that are depicted vividly, with clarity and detail. Her figurative, symbolic language and long sentences give her stories a poetic feeling. Her stories deal mainly with dark themes, such as betrayal, isolation, guilt, and human nature. Her life greatly influenced her writing. Most of her stories take place in the southwest, where she was brought up. The three stories contained in Pale Horse, Pale Rider are narrated by the fictional character of Miranda, whose life greatly resembles Porter’s own. She was not widely known or successful until her first and only novel, Ship of Fools, was published. While this novel brought her notoriety and made her financially stable, it was incredibly hard for her to accomplish because of its length.

Life

Born Callie Russell Porter, she was one of five children of Harrison Boone and Mary Alice Porter. She was born in Indian Creek, Texas on May 15, 1890. When Porter’s mother died in 1892, her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, took the children into her home. They lived with her and she raised them until her death in 1901, when Porter was eleven. She was then taken to a convent school, where she was educated. Porter ran away from the school to marry John Henry Koontz of Inez, Texas at sixteen. Their marriage ended nine years later in 1915 when Porter decided to become an actress.

Porter spent her early twenties moving back and forth between Texas and Chicago, supporting herself by working as an actress, singer, and, later, a secretary. During this time, she contracted tuberculosis. While she was recovering, she decided to become a writer. In 1918, she took a job with the Rocky Mountain News and moved to Denver, where she nearly died in the great influenza epidemic of that year. She moved to New York in 1919 to pursue a career as a journalist. She became interested in revolutionary politics in Mexico, and spent the next few years traveling between there and New York. During this time, she worked as a journalist, a publicist for a film company, and a ghostwriter for the book, My Chinese Marriage. She also published her three children's stories in Everyland Magazine under the penname of Katherine Anne Porter, after her grandmother. She married four more times in her life, but remained childless. From 1948 to 1958, Porter taught at Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Liège, Belgium, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Texas. In 1959, she moved to Washington to write Ship of Fools, a novel provided her with both fame and fortune. At eighty-seven, she suffered a disabling stroke and was unable to work. She died in a nursing home in College Park, Maryland on September 18, 1980 at the age of ninety.

Stories

Katherine Anne Porter’s stories deal mainly with dark themes. Death, the futility of love, loss, and solitude are common themes among her stories. One theme that appears in many of her stories is betrayal.

One story of betrayal is “Flowering Judas.” It is the story of a young American woman during the Marxist Revolution in Mexico. She aids the cause of Marxism and gives aid to the political prisoners, but she is not fully dedicated. She is numbed and disillusioned. She turns down all the suitors who are attracted to her. She feels empty and alone and “cannot make a true commitment to life.” At the end, the reader is invited into one of her nightmarish dreams, in which she eats the blossoms of a Judas tree. This symbolizes betrayal – her own betrayal of herself and the cause toward which she works. She fells she is damned because she lacks feeling and trust for religion and the world.

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is narrated in a modified stream-of-consciousness form by Miranda, a young woman who goes to hospitals to cheer up wounded soldiers. She dislikes the job and is depressed by all the wounded, unfriendly soldiers. She falls in love with Adam, a healthy, innocent, and handsome young soldier. She becomes very ill with the influenza and she becomes delirious. She has two dreams about the jungle, which symbolizes death, but escapes each time. She finally recovers by sheer force of will, only to find that her Adam has died from the influenza he caught while caring for her and that the war has ended.

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is a story of the last day of an old woman’s life told in stream-of –consciousness style. It is rather hard to follow at times, as Granny Weatherall drifts in and out of consciousness. Granny Weatherall is a stubborn and feisty old woman. As she lies dieing, she looks back over her life in a random, confused sort of way. She thinks about her husband, John, who is dead and how hard her life has been without him. She remembers raising her children alone, tending to sick children, servants, and animals without help, and raised a farm without a man to support her. She is proud of her child raising skills and that she never lost a child except for Hapsy, her last. She wishes she could see Hapsy and John, though she doesn’t think John will recognize her, being as old as she is. She thinks about her first love, George and how he jilted her. She remembers waiting for him in her white dress with a veil and how he never came. “But he had not come, just the same. What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come?” As Granny Weatherall enters the final stage before dying, she feels the darkness of death and realizes she is alone.

List of Works:

Books

• Flowering Judas and other stories (1930)
• Pale horse, Pale Rider (1940)
• The leaning tower and Other Stories (1944)
• The Days Before (1952)
• Ship of Fools (1962)
• The Collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965)
• Collected Essays and Occasional Writitngs (1970)

Short Stories

• “Maria Concepcion” (1922), originally published in The Century Magazine New York, then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “The Martyr” (July 1923), originally published in The Century Magazine New York
• “Virgin Violeta” (1924), originally published in The Century Magazine New York
• “He” (1927), originally published in New Masses, then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “Magic” (1928), originally published in transition then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “Rope” (1928), originally published in Second American Caravan then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “Theft” (1929), published in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929), originally published in transition then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “Flowering Judas” (1930), originally published in Hound and Horn then in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “The Cracked-Looking-Glass” (1932), published in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “Hacienda” (1934), published in Flowering Judas and other stories
• “The Downward Path to Wisdom” (1939)
• “Old Mortality” (1937), published in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
• “Noon Wine” (1937), published in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
• “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1940), published in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
• “The Source” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Journey” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Witness” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Circus” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “A Day's Work” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Grave” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Circus” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Last Leaf “ (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Old Order” (1944), published in The Leaning Tower and other stories
• “The Fig Tree” (1960)
• “Holiday” (1960)

Essays

• “The Necessary Enemy” (1948)
• “The Days Before” (1952)
• “A Defense Circle” (1954)
• “The Never-Ending Wrong” (1977)

Awards

• O. Henry award (1962), for “Holiday”
• National Book Award (1966), for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
• Pulitzer Prize (1966), for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
• Gold Medal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1967), for Fiction
• Three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature