SOURCE: "Placing Miss Porter," in The New Republic, Vol. 162, No. 10, March 7, 1970, pp. 25-6.

In the following review, Samuels offers a mixed assessment of Porter's The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, praising the author's technical skill while finding weakness in the substance of her writings.

The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings contain all of Katherine Anne Porter's previous volume of nonfiction, The Days Before, as well as an equal amount of essays, reviews, letters, and journal entries not gathered in the earlier book. Of the new material, we should welcome "St. Augustine and the Bullfight," a masterly memoir with the shapeliness of good fiction, "A Wreath for the Gamekeeper," which passionately and comically denounces Lady Chatterley's Lover, one chapter ("A Goat for Azazel") from an uncompleted biography of Cotton Mather, and scattered instances of wit and perception. Little of the rest, however, warrants reprinting, especially in a ponderous tome...