Katherine Anne Porter   (1890-1980) LINKS Katherine Anne Porter Library http://www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/RARE/797hmpgM.html This site is maintained by the Katherine Anne Porter Library at the University of Maryland. It features a photograph of the author; photos of the Katherine Anne Porter Room; a wonderful biography of the author with details of her upbringing and early writing career, her experiences in Greenwich Village, Mexico, Paris, and her teaching career; a selected bibliography of works by and about Katherine Anne Porter; a list of honors and awards; and a catalog of the Katherine Anne Porter papers. The Katherine Anne Porter Page http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webauthors /porter368-au-.html This multidisciplinary site, maintained by doctors at the New York University Medical School, features biographical information, and summaries and commentaries on "Holiday," "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of novellas. BIOGRAPHY Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas and was educated at boarding schools and an Ursuline convent. As a child she wanted to be a writer, but it took fifteen years of serious writing before she trusted herself enough as a stylist to approach a publisher. Porter's style is not so recognizably "southern" as William Faulkner's or Flannery O'Connor's. She was a southerner by tradition and inheritance, but she had thought of herself since childhood as "always restless, always a roving spirit." She was very conscious of her own art as a storyteller, and of the art of fiction in general; she wrote personal essays on Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Virginia Woolf. Particularly indebted in her best stories to Mansfield, Porter attempted to dramatize a character's state of mind rather than develop a complicated plot. Porter achieved acclaim with her first collection of stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, in 1930. Her most productive decade as a writer was the 1930s, when she published Noon Wine (1937) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939). She supported herself with lecture tours and teaching jobs at various universities while she worked on her novel Ship of Fools (1962), which took over two decades to complete. In 1965 her Collected Stories won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

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