Porter, Katherine Anne
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), a writer from the South, lived her life according to what she believed in and learned early on about the stark realities of life. She spent her early years working as a teacher of drama, dance and song to help support her and her father. These misfortunes are what made Porter the amazing writer that she is, focusing on themes of death, mistrust and depraved human behavior. In 1962 she published Ship of Fools, which took her 20 years to write. Critical opinions were mixed although it was the best selling novel of her career and of 1962. It is set before the start of World War II and follows the voyage of a group of passengers on their way from Mexico to Europe.
Porter often took many, many years after events to write about and analyze it fully, using her own life as a base for her work. Her writing was a way to face questions that were left unanswered in her own life, giving her work a passionate, realistic and harsh voice. In 1966 Porter won a Pulitzer Prize, the Gold Medal for Fiction and the National Book Award for The Collected Stories, published in 1965.
Major Works
- Ship of Fools
- ‘Flowering Judas’
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
- The Old Order: Stories of the South
- Pale Horse, Pale Rider
- Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter
Autobiographies and Biographies about Katherine Anne Porter
- Letters of Katherine Anne Porter
- Katherine Anne Porter: A Biography by Joan Givner
- Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist by Darlene Harbour Unrue
- The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter by Mary Titus
More Information
Visit the Katherine Anne Porter Center and Room
- Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center - Kyle, TX
- Katherine Anne Porter Room - University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
“Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.”
“If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.”
“A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.”
“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…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 finished the thing, but I think I sprained my soul. I spent 15 years wandering about, weighed horribly with masses of paper and little else. Yet for this vocation of writing I was and am willing to die, and I consider very few things pf the slightest importance.” (On Ship of Fools, May 15, 1890)
“A novel is really life a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time.”
“In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.”
“One of the marks of a gift is to is to have the courage of it.”
“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.”
“Adventure is something you seek for pleasure or even for profit…but experience is what really happens to you in the long run, the truth that finally overtakes you.”
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
Love it! I haven’t thought about Porter in such a long time. . . thanks for reminding me how much I love her work. She was quite the weaver of stories, even off the page!