"They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not." -- Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 — September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
"Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.""Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.""I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.""I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.""I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.""It is such a relief to be told the truth.""It's a man's world, and you men can have it.""Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.""Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.""One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.""Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.""Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.""The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being."
Katherine Anne Porter, born in Indian Creek, Texas, was the fourth of five children of Harrison Boone Porter and Alice (Jones) Porter. Her family tree can be traced back to American frontiersman Daniel Boone, and O. Henry was her father's second cousin.
In 1892, when Porter was two years old, Porter's mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's 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. Her grandmother died in while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas.
After her grandmother's death, 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 age sixteen, Porter left home and married John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy Texas ranching family, and subsequently converted to Koontz's religion, Roman Catholicism. Koontz was physically abusive; once while drunk, he threw her down the stairs, breaking her ankle. They divorced officially in 1915.
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. In 1915, she asked that her name be changed to Katherine Anne Porter as part of her divorce decree.
Also in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the following two years in sanatoria, where she decided to become a writer. It was discovered during that time, however, that she had bronchitis, not TB. 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. In the same year, Katherine almost died in Denver during the 1918 flu pandemic. When she was discharged from the hospital months later, she was frail and completely bald. When her hair finally grew back, it was white, and remained that color for the rest of her life. Her experiences during treatment provided the background for her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
In 1919, Porter moved to Greenwich Village in New York City 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, Porter became disillusioned with the revolutionary movement and its leaders. But in the 1920s 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, Porter traveled back and forth between Mexico and New York City and began publishing short stories and essays. Her first published story was "Maria Concepcion" in The Century Magazine. In 1930, she published her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories. An expanded edition of this collection was published in 1935 and received such critical acclaim that it alone virtually assured her place in American literature.
In 1926, Porter married Ernest Stock and lived briefly in Connecticut before divorcing him in 1927. Some suggest that Porter suffered several miscarriages, at least one stillbirth between 1910 and 1926, and an abortion, and after contracting gonorrhea from Stock, that she had a hysterectomy in 1927, ending her hopes of ever having a child. Yet Porter's letters to her lovers suggest that she still intimated her menstruation after this supposed hysterectomy in 1927. As she once confided to a friend, "I have lost children in all the ways one can."
During the 1930s, Porter spent several years in Europe during which she continued to publish short stories. In 1930, she married Eugene Pressley, a writer thirteen years her junior. In 1938, upon returning from Europe, she divorced Pressley and married Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., a graduate student who was twenty years younger. He reportedly divorced her in 1942 after discovering her real age. She never remarried.
Between 1948 and 1958, Porter taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, 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, which was the best-selling novel in America for that year; its success finally gave her financial security (she reportedly sold the film rights for $400,000).
Despite Porter's claim that after the publication of Ship of Fools she would not win any more prizes in America, 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.Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90, and her ashes were buried next to her mother at Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.
1966 — Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories (1965)
1966 — National Book Award for The Collected Stories (1965)
1967 — Gold Medal Award for Fiction (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
Three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature
2006 — Porter was featured on a United States postage stamp issued 15 May 2006. She was the 22nd person featured in the Literary Arts commemorative stamp series.
