Word: porter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Katherine Anne Porter has consistently been admired for what she is not. Since 1923, when her first story was published, the critics have solemnly compared her to Chekhov, Turgenev, George Eliot; and since 1962, when Ship of Fools became an international bestseller, the book-club brigade has revered the white-haired lady from Texas as the Grandma Moses of literature. Both judgments are wide of the mark...
...author who in 71 years has published only 27 stories and one novel can scarcely be considered a major writer; and that little old white-haired lady is one of the grimmer misanthropes of 20th century literature. Clearly, Author Porter requires reappraisal, and that reappraisal will doubtless be provoked by the publication of this volume: the first complete collection of her long and short stories-among them four never published before...
Blue Light in the Brain. Author Porter was born on a back-country spread in Texas, got her schooling in Louisiana convents, went on to work for newspapers in New Orleans and New York. She was 29 before she published her first story and 36 before her first book of stories (Flowering Judas) came out. One of the tales, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, is a ten-page masterpiece. Its setting is the Texas farm, the great good place in which all her best writing is rooted; and the Granny of the title is the author's first representation...
...Hate Love." Having at last dug up her creative capital, Author Porter disbursed it with incredible stinginess. She spent the next nine years making notes for three 50-page stories and then dashed them off in a mere three weeks. In these stories the reader becomes aware for the first time that something had gone seriously awry in the author's life. In Old Mortality, the story of her own emergence from anxious adolescence into worried womanhood, she describes for the first time the emotion that dominates her later work: misanthropy. "She would have no more bonds that smothered...
Self-sufficiency, it seems, had become her ideal, and in Pale Horse, Pale Rider-a story that tells how she almost died of the flu during World War I-Author Porter describes how she snatched her life, and with it her independence, out of the jaws of death. "Death is death, she said. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, no longer aware yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon...