In the following essay, Unrue explores Porter's attitude toward art, religion, politics, and philosophy as evinced in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Brinkmeyer traces Porter's growing interest in familial identity and Southern heritage and determines its effect on her fiction.

In the following essay from his full-length study of Porter's work, Hendrick classifies Porter's short fiction into four main categories based on common thematic concerns, stylistic techniques, and settings.

In the following essay, Titus considers Porter's depiction of the female artist in “Holiday.”

In the following essay, Walsh evaluates the autobiographical nature of Porter's story, “Flowering Judas.”

In the following essay, Stout examines the reticence of the central character, Miranda, and perceives it as evidence of her wisdom.

In the following essay, which was originally published in PMLA in 1969, Gottfried examines Porter's use of religious imagery and language in “Flowering Judas.”

In the following essay, Ciuba analyzes the roles of mourning and death in Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

In the following essay, French offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Porter's “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”

In the following essay, Baker places Porter's short fiction within a literary context and traces the influence of her time in Mexico on her life and her fiction.

In the following essay, Titus explores sexuality, gender politics, and the objectification of women in Porter's early published and unpublished writing.

In the following essay, Jones discusses Porter's treatment of feminist issues in Old Mortality.

In the following essay, Titus discusses the relationship between aspects of Porter's life—particularly the death of her mother—and her short stories “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree.”

In the following essay, Brinkmeyer considers the role of memory in Porter's work, concluding that her “exploration of memory places her in the company of a number of other modern Southern writers who made similar if less extreme quests.”

In the following essay, Cheatham discusses the theme of death in Porter's Miranda stories.

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

In the following essay, Hoefel provides a feminist interpretation of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."

In the following essay, Perry appraises Porter's story “Hacienda” as a combination of her major thematic concerns, concluding that change is the most important theme in the piece.

In the following essay, Moddelmog offers a psychoanalytical reading of Porter's “He.”

In the following essay, Gernes explores the autobiographical nature of the death sequence in Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

In the following essay, Bell provides a detailed comparison of Katherine Mansfield's “The Garden Party” and Porter's “The Grave.”

In the following essay, Allen examines psychological devices and symbolism employed by Porter to illustrate hostility and frustration.

In the following excerpt, Kieft explores Porter's attitudes toward love and romantic relationships as shaped by her personal experiences and reflected in her writing.

In the following essay, Rooke and Wallis assert that critical interest in Porter's “The Grave” has long ignored the story's dominant themes—particularly the fall of man—in favor of a series of less important symbols in the story.

In the following essay, Howell evaluates Porter as a Southern writer.

In the following essay, Unrue provides a close reading of Porter's “Theft” in order to reveal “the extent to which politics was interwoven into Porter's concept and practice of art.”

In the following essay, Gwin praises the sensory details of Porter's short fiction, in particular her depiction of eating and drinking in the stories comprising Flowering Judas.

In the following essay, Liberman explores the significance of symbolism in "Flowering Judas" and addresses previous critical readings of the story.

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.

In the following essay, Gordon draws attention to the literary accomplishments of Porter.

In the following essay, Cheatham argues against an antiformalist approach to Porter's fiction.

[Katherine Anne Porter's] sense of what makes for an ending is similar to that found in Aristotle's definition of Greek tragedy; and that was an analogy that she was proudly conscious of, as she remarked. "Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation—what the Greeks would call catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination—through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true. Oh, not in any pawky individual idea of morality o...

Most good stories are about the interior of our lives, but Katherine Anne Porter's stories take place there; they show surface Katherine Anne Porter 1890–1980 © Rollie McKennaonly at her choosing. Her use of the physical world is enough to meet her needs and no more; she is not wasteful with anything. This artist, writing her stories with a power that stamps them to their last detail on the memory, does so to an extraord...

In the following essay, Joselyn maintains that a reading of Porter's “The Grave” “will serve to illustrate several of the main characteristics of the ‘lyric’ short story.”

Like so much American writing—particularly Southern writing—Katherine Anne Porter's stories of the Old South ("The Old Order" series and "Old Mortality") based on her family past in antebellum Kentucky and Texas during the Reconstruction Era offer a statement about the past and its impact on the present. At the same time, these stories provide a way of approaching Porter as a woman writer. Like Faulkner—also writing about the Southern past in the mid-1...

Many of [Katherine Anne Porter's] stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction, and some are not often equaled. She belongs to the relatively small group of writers—extraordinarily small, when one considers the vast number of stories published every year in English and American magazines—who have done serious, consistent, original, and vital work in the form of short fiction—the group which would include James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. (p. ...

"Stylist" is likely to call up unclear images of coloratura, acrobatics, elaborateness of gesture, a mingling of formalism probably euphuistic with conspicuous private variations, like fingerprints…. It is not so with Miss Porter. There is nothing of arresting facade in her style, nothing of showmanship…. In Ship of Fools the style is a window of things and people, not a symbolic aggression of ego upon them. It seems compelled by the objects in the fiction; it is their visible su...

About a decade ago, there arose a flurry of critical interest in Katherine Anne Porter's story "The Grave." This inquiry quickly subsided, apparently satisfied that "The Grave" had been adequately explained. In fact it had not, for an intense preoccupation with the predominating symbols of the short story had entailed a concomitant limiting of critical focus, so that the widest implications of the story were ignored…. Focusing upon the few most obtrusive symbols...

When Cousin Eva, the spinster suffragette in "Old Mortality," bitterly condemns the family as a "hideous institution," one that is "the root of all human wrongs" and that ought to be "wiped from the face of the earth," she is somewhat consciously oversimplifying, and overstating, her own attitude. Certainly Eva's remarks alone do not adequately convey Katherine Anne Porter's complex views on the subject. In her stories, the family is alwa...

[In a speech given to a group of University of Maryland students in 1972, Katherine Anne Porter] said that all her fiction is reportage, it really happened, but she arranges it and it becomes fiction. Her most ambitious attempt to explain her creative process was made at the invitation of Robert Penn Warren and appeared as "'Noon Wine': The Sources" in Yale Review in 1954. In this essay she related the separate anecdotes which formed the basis of "Noon Wine," saying...

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.

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 once wrote, "I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike; there are broad classifications and deep similarities, but I am interested in the thumbprint." No work could better illustrate her interest than "Noon Wine," whose four main characters, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, Mr. Helton, and Mr. Hatch, are so clearly individuated through their actions, speech, and physical appearance that it is difficult to imagine how they could ...

In the following review, Hosmer praises the publication of Letters of Katherine Anne Porter.

Katherine Anne Porter remains chiefly a writer's writer. Such a circumstance is a pity, for in her short stories and novelle she has a great deal to say to all intelligent readers; and she says it with clarity and beauty. She is by no means difficult to read; and, though her overzealous critics have made a few of her short stories seem overwrought with symbolism, there is actually little of the occult in her work. She has always lacked patience with the literary faddists—those people who affec...

The main tenet of [Katherine Anne Porter's moral] philosophy is that the evildoers are not the most reprehensible people in the world, because they at least have the courage of their convictions. Nor are they the most dangerous people, since they can be easily recognized. The people who really need to be watched are the so-called innocents who stand by and allow others to perpetrate evil. Porter was to express repeatedly the opinion that the innocent bystanders allow the activity of evildoers, not me...

No exploration of Katherine Anne Porter's "personality" … can explain the success of her art: the scrupulous and expressive intricacy of structure, the combination of a precision of language, the revealing shock of precise observation and organic metaphor, a vital rhythmic felicity of style, and a significant penetration of a governing idea into the remotest details of a work. If, as V. S. Pritchett has put it, the writer of short stories is concerned with "one thing that ...

In the following review, the critic notes the strength of Porter's technical skill and offers brief assessments of each of the short stories in Flowering Judas.

In the following essay, Troy offers a favorable review of Flowering Judas and Other Stories.

In the following review, Bogan praises Flowering Judas.

Katherine Anne Porter is seldom recognized as a feminist, and little known as a literary critic. She was both…. Porter exhibits in her work a well-trained critical intellect which frequently addressed itself, particularly during the early part of her career, to women's rights and women's concerns. Her book reviews from the 1920's provide ample evidence both of her critical abilities and of her commitment to the feminist cause…. These early book reviews illustrate Porter&#x...

[It] is a fact that K. A. Porter was as emotionally involved with the South as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Her love for her South is reflected in her writing. (p. 441) Some critical comments demonstrate how fatal it can be to overlook K. A. Porter's emotional involvement with her native area. She created a myth from her family history, but she did not mistake the myth for reality. And she did not idealize or sentimentalize the past, yet she made it clear that there is no escape from it. The ch...

Because Katherine Anne Porter's fictional descriptions of the South of her childhood correspond so exactly to those in her factual accounts, her Miranda stories have been read as closely autobiographical. Although she has warned against such literal-mindedness, the author's own image as an aristocratic daughter of the Old South tends to confirm the authenticity of the background. The settings of "Old Mortality" and "The Old Order" seem entirely appropriate to Kather...

Miss Porter has no genius but much talent. Her average level is high, and she doesn't let you down. She is more fundamentally serious than Katherine Mansfield, less neurotic, closer to the earth. She is dry-eyed, even in tragedy: when she jokes, she does not smile. You feel you can trust her. (p. 312) I liked "Noon Wine" best of [the stories in Pale Horse, Pale Rider]. It is an examination of "the nature of a crime," a subtle, psychological theme handled so directly, so co...