SOURCE: "Katherine Anne Porter's Crowning Work," in The New Republic, Vol. 146, No. 2474, April 2, 1962, pp. 23-5.

In the following review, Kaufmann cites shortcomings in Ship of Fools, particularly concerning theme and character development.

Katherine Anne Porter has published her first novel at the age of 72, and since she spent 20 years on it, we must assume it will be her only novel. She forecast the book in 1940 in the preface to the Modern Library edition of Flowering Judas:

[These stories] are fragments of a much larger plan I am still engaged in carrying out…. All the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic...