Craig White's Literature Courses authors

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

adapted from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kaporter.htm:

Brown County, Texas, home of Indian Creek, birthplace of Katherine Anne Porter 1890

Kyle, Texas, where Porter grew up

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek (Brown County), Texas, but she grew up in Kyle in Hays County, Texas.

Porter was raised by her father and paternal grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter, a stern disciplinarian, whose reminiscences of the Civil War and tales of her family's past were Porter's first introduction to the art of storytelling. She died when Porter was eleven, but her strong character provided a model for grandmothers in her stories.

Porter was educated in convent schools though her formal education was rather irregular. In 1904-05 she attended the Thomas School in San Antonio. At the age of sixteen she ran away from a New Orleans convent and married the first of her four husbands

Between the years 1918 and 1921 Porter became involved in revolutionary politics in Mexico, the scene of several of her stories, and where she worked as a journalist and teacher.

Porter's first collection of short stories was Flowering Judas. The limited edition of 600 copies appeared in 1930. However, this work established her reputation as a highly original writer and earned her a Guggenheim grant. The collection was enlarged in 1935.

Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) received also widespread critical acclaim. It consisted of three short novels: 'Old Mortality', 'Noon Wine', a study of evil, set on a Texas farm circa 1900, and the titlepiece, which tells of a short-lived love affair between a soldier and a young Southern newspaperwoman during the influenza epidemic of World War I.

The central character in the stories is Miranda, whose background is roughly parallel to Porter's—she runs away from a convent, and in the last story she is working as a reporter on a western newspaper. In The Learning Tower (1944) there are six related stories dealing with Miranda and her family background. 'The Old Order' gives the most complete picture of Miranda's family-the grandmother was the great-granddaughter of "Kentucky's most famous pioneer" (Daniel Boone). The unnamed narrator is Miranda.

Her Collected Stories (1965) was awarded in 1966 both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Only novel: The Ship Of Fools (1962), an allegorical story set on a passenger ship.

Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980.

from http://www.famoustexans.com/katherineanneporter.htm

She was one of five children of Harrison Boone and Mary Alice (Jones) Porter. When Mary died in 1892, Harrison's mother, Catherine Anne Porter took care of her grandchildren in her home in Kyle until her death in 1901.

Living in a rented room in Victoria, Katherine supported her father and herself by teaching dramatic arts, singing, elocution, and dance, all of which she learned at the Thomas School in San Antonio.

Buried beside her mother's grave in the Indian Creek Cemetery at Indian Creek.

In late August 1999, it was announced that the house at 508 W. Center Street in Kyle, where Porter was raised, would be renovated and operated as writers center by Southwest Texas State University. The renovation was made possible by a donation of $600,000 from Curt Engelhorn, the son and nephew of Porter's childhood playmates Anita and Erna Schlemer.