SOURCE: A review of Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, in New York Times Book Review, May 27, 1990, pp. 1, 23.

In the following review, Price praises the publication of Porter's correspondence for offering new insight into the life and work of the author.

Katherine Anne Porter wrote letters of an astonishing intellectual sinew and clarity with an ease that escaped when she turned to fiction. Despite the fact that the best of her stories, short novels and essays are as strong as any in American letters—"Noon Wine" alone can stand, calm, shoulder to shoulder, with anything in Tolstoy or Chekhov—her work has yet to win the wide and steady attention it earns and rewards. Most years I read her collected stories with students at an excellent university; and given the fact that their experience of past writers is generally meager, I unfailingly discover that almost none of them—even...