Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings »

Darlene Harbour Unrue, editor, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author, most recently, of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist. She is the editor of Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter's Poetry, and “This Strange, Old World” and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter, and a past president of the Katherine Anne Porter Society.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Katherine Anne Porter came into the life of my father, J. F. Powers, at "the vital, saving moment," as he later put it. He had already published his first short story in the literary magazine Accent -- as, in time, would Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, and William Gass, among others -- and had submitted another story, "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does." The editors couldn't make up their minds about this and sent it to Porter for her opinion. She wrote back saying that Powers should rewrite the story and included suggestions to that end, declaring further that under no circumstance should they let this promising young writer get away. My father rewrote it and was so grateful to Porter for her intercession and comments that he wanted to dedicate the story to her. The editors said, no, that would be gauche. Porter, hearing of this years later, shortly before I was born, in fact, was not at all pleased, calling the editors' veto "some mysterious standard of etiquette which I do not pretend to grasp."

Go Little Book

Flowering Judas and Other Stories

Maria Concepcion

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 Winged 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 Redoute

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 Benjamin 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

Chronology

Note on the Texts

Notes

Index