Biography Essay

Katherine Anne Porter's literary reputation rests on the twenty-seven stories in her Collected Stories (1964) rather than on the best-selling novel Ship of Fools (1962), on which she worked intermittently for thirty years. She was one of the most brilliant practitioners of the art of the short story, and because of her style (personal as well as literary), she was an important influence on the generation of writers that followed her, including William Humphrey, William Goyen, Tillie Olsen, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. During her lifetime, Porter's work won praise for its style and was the focus of close readings.

Two years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1982; republished with a new preface in 1991), the first full-length scholarly biography, appeared. Coincidentally, the growing volume and sophistication of feminist criticism was providing new insights into women writers and their works. New interpretations of the art...