SOURCE: “South by Southwest: Texas and the Deep South in the Stories of Katherine Anne Porter,” in Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 37, No. 3, Autumn, 1995, pp. 495–502.

In the following essay, Blair explores the discrepancy between Porter's Old South origins as described in her fiction and the realities of her background.

When I first came to live in San Marcos, Texas, about ten miles or so south of Katherine Anne Porter's hometown of Kyle, I discovered I would be living on a kind of geographical cusp between what to all appearances was the Wild West and the Old South. To the west is the Texas Hill Country with its sere white limestone and its scrubby post oak and cedar, and to the east, just below where the university sits up on the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, begins the rich farmland of the Blackland prairie with its great southern-plantation-style stretches...