Katherine Anne Porter: Collected
Stories and Other Writings (Library of
America #186) by Katherine Anne
Porter
Katherine Ann Porter/Library Of America
Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter “writes stories with a power
that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” Set in her native
Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old
South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning
that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They
number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, “many
are unsurpassed in modern fiction,” and when gathered in one volume in
1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The
Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely
new selection from Porter’s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the

contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early
journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works
collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she
loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette;
personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her
own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays
and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously
uncollected forays into autobiography.
Personal Review: Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and
Other Writings (Library of America #186) by Katherine Anne
Porter
With the publication of Collected Stories and Other Writings, Katherine
Anne Porter, author of Ship of Fools, some twenty-six short stories,
numerous essays, sketches, speeches and reviews, becomes part of the
remarkable Library of America series (its 186th volume) honoring the work
of America's greatest and most important writers.
This one-volume collection, edited by Porter biographer Darlene Unrue,
includes all of Porter's short stories (including the three that Porter herself
preferred to call "short novels") and eighty nonfiction pieces, most of which
have been out-of-print for years. Of particular interest among the nonfiction
pieces selected for this volume by Unrue are two previously unpublished
autobiographical essays written in 1933 and 1974 in which Porter
discusses her early life and the influences on her writing. And, of course,
readers searching for more information about Porter's long life and career
will appreciate the 21-page "Chronology" placed at the end of this 1100-
page book that details her ninety-year lifetime.
Porter was often a critic of her times, but she took her criticism a step or
two further by her general criticism of society and even of human nature
itself. She was most certainly a keen observer of people, and some of her
best stories are the often deceptively simple ones that focus on the unique
relationship between husbands and wives. These are largely
conversational presentations that clearly illustrate just how much is left
unsaid in a marriage, stories in which real feelings are shown inside the
heads of her main characters but never expressed out loud in the long
conversations between husband and wife. Two particularly fine examples
of this type are Porter's "Rope" and "The Cracked Looking Glass," both of
which were included in her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and
Other Stories.
Porter, born in Indian Creek, Texas, near San Antonio, had the familiarity
and love for Mexico shared by so many Texans. Her earliest published
short stories are set during the Mexican Revolution years between 1910
and 1920, and her nonfiction pieces include more than two dozen essays
on her love for that country and what she experienced there during such a
dramatic period of its history. That Porter felt as much at home in Mexico

as in Texas is obvious because of the depth to which she captured these
times and Mexico's people.
The last publication of Porter's lifetime, 1977's "The Never-Ending Wrong,"
her reaction to the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, is perhaps one of the
most powerful pieces she ever wrote. Porter, who stood with hundreds of
others outside the prison while the two were executed for their crime,
admits that she could not determine for herself their actual guilt or
innocence. But she makes a strong argument that their trial was one of
those "in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial
took place." She likens their trial to the trials of Jesus, Joan of Arc, those
tried in Salem during the infamous witchcraft trials of 1692, and those
condemned to death by Stalin in his 1937 Moscow show trials.
Collected Stories and Other Writings should help solidify Katherine Anne
Porter's literary reputation for generations to come, something that was
becoming more and more difficult to do because so much of her work was
out-of-print prior to this publication. Darlene Unrue has placed a wide
range of Porter's best work in one volume, a book that will prove to be a
must-have for Porter fans and an important book for anyone who
appreciates the best short fiction produced in the twentieth century.
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