SOURCE: “‘The Man in the Tree’: Katherine Anne Porter's Unfinished Lynching Story,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 7–16.

In the following essay, Gretlund explores Porter's treatment of racism in her unfinished story “The Man in the Tree.”

Katherine Anne Porter's manuscript “The Man in the Tree” focuses on the racism of her native region at the turn of the century.¹ The notes for this story read like a contribution to later debates on integration, and I always felt that it was unfortunate that she chose not to finish it. Her strong opinions on racial issues, as expressed in this manuscript, deserve to be remembered. Porter seems to have worked on the story in 1933 and 1934, as Joan Givner reports,² but the state of the manuscript and the use of different typewriters show that she returned to it over the years. The manuscript is also valuable for what it...