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Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) | essays, reviews, and other writings More

Edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue

“Combines Porter’s short stories collections — Flowering Judas and Other Stories; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories — with a large dose of her short prose (reviews, criticism, essays, travel pieces, and more) that has long been unavailable. A ton of great stuff!”— Library Journal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Magic,” Katherine Anne Porter
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Interviews Katherine Anne Porter’s “unflinching account of the human condition”
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In the 1920s and ’30s, Katherine Anne Porter emerged as a classicist among the moderns, a lapidary miniaturist whose every short story was greeted as a thing of timeless perfection. Edmund Wilson called her “a first-rate artist” who wrote “English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary American fiction.” Her mastery of theme and gift for characterization were hers alone among the storywriters; even her shortest works were imbued with a richness of design, incident, and experience seldom found outside long novels. Her ambition and her range of emotion and effect—from cold realism to measureless compassion, from the plainspoken to the lyrical—were unequaled in her time and have had few successors. She was, and is forever, an American original.

The centerpiece of this Library of America edition of Porter’s shorter writings is The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965), the career-capping volume that won for its author a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, in Greenwich Village, Berlin, and the gothic Old South, these are stories that, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, “suggest the whole rather than the surface of life.” They include her first, “María Concepción” (1922), the tale of a Mexican Indian who confronts her husband’s lover in a world where jealousy, revenge, and death are constant companions and the first allegiance is always to the living. Also her last, “Holiday” (1960), in which a young woman’s account of her summer vacation—as the paying guest of a family of German farmers on the Texas-Louisiana border—deepens into a meditation on mute suffering, the rituals of death, and the death-in-life that is the failure to recognize a fellow person’s humanity. All 26 stories—among them such masterpieces as “Flowering Judas,” “Noon Wine,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—are wide in vision but laser-sharp in focus; they exemplify, in the words of Mary Gordon, “the clarity and inclusiveness of the art we proclaim as great.”

Here too, in the most comprehensive selection ever published, are Porter’s short nonfiction writings, including speeches, notes, and essays on the writer’s craft, literary reflections on Hardy, Pound, and Welty, political dispatches from revolutionary Mexico, and a personal history of the Sacco-Vanzetti case—some 80 items in all, concluding with two previously uncollected autobiographical essays. Storyteller and critic, reporter and book reviewer, private citizen and public figure, Porter in this collection can at last be seen whole, in all her roles and variety and excellence. She is unforgettable, a multifaceted master of American prose.

Darlene Harbour Unrue, volume editor, is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author, most recently, of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

The Collected Stories of Katharine Anne Porter

Go Little Book

Flowering Judas and Other Stories
María Concepción
Virgin Violeta
The Martyr
Magic
Rope
He
Theft
That Tree
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Flowering Judas
The Cracked Looking-Glass
Hacienda

Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Old Mortality
Noon Wine
Pale Horse, Pale Rider

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
The Old Order
The Source
The Journey
The Witness
The Circus
The Last Leaf
The Fig Tree
The Grave
The Downward Path to Wisdom
A Day’s Work
Holiday
The Leaning Tower

Essays, Reviews, and Other Writings

“I needed both . . .”

Critical
The Days Before
Reflections on Willa Cather
A Note on The Troll Garden
Gertrude Stein: Three Views
“Everybody Is a Real One”
Second Wind
The Wooden Umbrella
“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”
Eudora Welty and A Curtain of Green
The Wingèd Skull
On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy
E. M. Forster
Virginia Woolf
D. H. Lawrence
Quetzalcoatl
A Wreath for the Gamekeeper
“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”
The Art of Katherine Mansfield
The Hundredth Role
Dylan Thomas
“A death of days . . .”
“A fever chart . . .”
“In the morning of the poet . . .”
A Most Lively Genius
Orpheus in Purgatory
In Memoriam
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)
James Joyce (1882–1941)
Sylvia Beach (1887–1962)
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)

Personal and Particular
On Writing
My First Speech
“I must write from memory . . .”
No Plot, My Dear, No Story
“Writing cannot be taught . . .”
The Situation of the Writer
The Situation in American Writing
Transplanted Writers
The International Exchange of Writers
The Author on Her Work
No Masters or Teachers
On “Flowering Judas”
“The only reality . . .”
“Noon Wine”: The Sources
Notes on the Texas I Remember
Portrait: Old South
A Christmas Story
Audubon’s Happy Land
The Flower of Flowers
A Note on Pierre-Joseph Redouté
A House of My Own
The Necessary Enemy
“Marriage Is Belonging”
A Defense of Circe
St. Augustine and the Bullfight
Act of Faith: 4 July 1942
The Future Is Now
The Never-Ending Wrong

Mexican
Why I Write About Mexico
Reports from Mexico City, 1920–1922
The New Man and the New Order
The Fiesta of Guadalupe
The Funeral of General Benjamín Hill
Children of Xochitl
The Mexican Trinity
Where Presidents Have No Friends
In a Mexican Patio
Leaving the Petate
The Charmed Life
Corridos
Sor Juana: A Portrait of the Poet
Notes on the Life and Death of a Hero
A Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943
Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”
Paternalism and the Mexican Problem
La Conquistadora
¡Ay, Que Chamaco!
Old Gods and New Messiahs
Diego Rivera
These Pictures Must Be Seen
Rivera’s Personal Revolution
Parvenu . . .
History on the Wing
Thirty Long Years of Revolution

Autobiographical
About the Author
The Land That Is Nowhere

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-029-2 1093 pages

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N° 186 Library of America Series

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