SOURCE: “The Making of ‘Flowering Judas,’” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, March, 1985, pp. 109–30.

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

Over the years Katherine Porter furnished many autobiographical details about her most celebrated story, “Flowering Judas” (1930), stating that “all the characters and episodes are based on real persons and events, but naturally, as my memory worked upon them and time passed, all assumed different shapes and colors, formed gradually around a central idea, that of self-delusion, the order and meaning of the episodes changed, and became in a word fiction.”¹ This essay, drawing from Porter's published comments on the story, her unpublished letters, notes, and fiction,² and my conversations with her and with her friend, Mary Louis Doherty, attempts to distinguish between the “real persons and events” and the “different shapes and colors” they assumed. Despite the thin record...