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Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America #186)

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Katherine Anne Porter's stories, as well as her novel "Ship of Fools," have never gone out of print. They've always been available in some edition or another, albeit mostly in paperback. So it's gratifying to see her stories finally grace the Library of America series, in a handsome new hardcover edition edited by her most recent biographer, Darlene Unrue. The bonus, of course, is the inclusion of nearly all of Porter's finest essays and personal and particular pieces. Most of these have been out of print for decades, and many are masterpieces in their own right. Also, two previously unpublished autobiographical sketches are included. Ms. Unrue has seleced a fine array of non-fiction pieces and provided invaluable notes at the end of the volume.

Reprinted is Porter's beautiful tribute to Willa Cather, as well as her famous caricature of Gertrude Stein. Both essays reveal as much about Porter herself, and her passionate convictions, as their intended subjects. Whether in praise or damnation, Porter's comments about literature, morality, politics, aesthetics, and the role of the artist in society are illuminating of their particular time and place. They are also timeless and thought provoking, even disturbing and downright jolting. Every epoch has its peculiar preoccupations, which can become timeless works of art or distortions of what it means to be human. In the Cather essay, Porter discusses the preoccupation with experimentation of early literary modernism, then deftly segues into the horrific medical experiments carried out by Nazi Germany. This is classic Porter--the limitless, unfettered human spirit she so admired, as personified by Willa Cather, juxtaposed with the flip side of the coin, the sinister aspects of human nature. It is precisely these explorations that are the hallmarks of her fiction, and it's no wonder that critics and readers alike continue to marvel at the depths she was able to penetrate in relatively short space. In that aspect she is all but peerless.

Every line written by Katherine Anne Porter testifies to her striking originality. Porter's influences were diverse, but the final distillation of those influences resulted in a voice that is uniquely her own and bears no resemblance to any other master. And "master" she was, triumphantly so. Robert Penn Warren's assertion that her best work is unsurpassed in modern literature holds true as much today as when he first proffered the remark, nearly seventy years ago.

KAP's 1982 biographer, Joan Givner, complained that Porter's stories were being supplanted in anthologies by current favorites that were often inferior to Porter's work. Hopefully, this volume will help rectify what Givner rightly called "an error in judgment." Personal tastes may vary, but no one can objectively say that any other short story master surpassed Katherine Anne Porter. Only the absolutely finest story writers, past and present, are her equals. The 1,100 pages of this Library of America edition--released on the 28th anniversary of Porter's death--amount to a literary treasure. In fact, a national treasure.

This is Library of America at its best, a volume wonderful just to hold as you read. I'd read Porter's lone novel "Ship of Fools" thirty or forty years ago but was not prepared for the sharp subliminal eye she brings to every sentence of her stories and short novels. Until I look it over again, I must call "Ship of Fools" a far lesser work than the glories set forth here. In some stories I thought at first that Porter'd sunk to mere storytelling, but by story's end found myself wonderstruck. She has no commonplaces of speech or description, never writes a sentence just for information--it will have color or tone or some purpose beyond information. For example, the very amusing, brilliant story "A Day's Work" opens with the sound of rats scrambling inside a wall, an apt image for poverty-stricken Irish New Yorkers during the seventh year of the Depression--although the so-called rats turn out to be a dumbwaiter lifting groceries from below to an upstairs apartment, while this story's comic realism later swerves into time-gaps of foot-slipping rock-solid drunkenness. Most of these stories were written in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, long before the arrival of magical realism from Garcia-Marquez, but they often have a magical effect that sinks you so deep into the events and consciousness of the characters that you find yourself carried by some underground river from event to unheralded event. When you begin each story it's often hard to believe that this is the same writer of the earlier stories of hers you've just read. So it's pointless to choose some single story as my favorite--they all differ in genre, unless you think of Porter's magnifying eye and depth of sensibiity as a genre unto itself--but for me her "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" remains matchless even by her (and outshines Tolstoy's short novel "The Death of Ivan Illych"), which is not to say that other stories herein don't have passages of power equal to "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". But if you are a writer yourself--and no matter how skilled--this story (and this volume) can nonetheless leave you skinless with envy.

I love Katherine Anne Porter anyway but this collection is definitive. I had read her fiction before but this collection includes her book reviews and her thoughts about other writers and how they influenced her. While I don't worry about where writers get their ideas or styles, her insights into literature are always very interesting.

I am a subscriber to the Library of America, and I love their books. For the usual price of one hardcover book, you get several novels and many things not usually collected/published, such as letters and unpublished writings. Each book also has a chronology of the author and notes which help explain/clarify the writings. I bought the Katherine Ann Porter book for my mother to replace an aging copy of a novel she owned. She is thrilled with the compactness and the print of the book, as well as getting more of Porter's works. The Library of America's books are a good bargain if you're interested in reading American authors.

With the publication of Collected Stories and Other Writings, Katherine Anne Porter, author of Ship of Fools, some twenty-six short stories, numerous essays, sketches, speeches and reviews, becomes part of the remarkable Library of America series (its 186th volume) honoring the work of America's greatest and most important writers.

This one-volume collection, edited by Porter biographer Darlene Unrue, includes all of Porter's short stories (including the three that Porter herself preferred to call "short novels") and eighty nonfiction pieces, most of which have been out-of-print for years. Of particular interest among the nonfiction pieces selected for this volume by Unrue are two previously unpublished autobiographical essays written in 1933 and 1974 in which Porter discusses her early life and the influences on her writing. And, of course, readers searching for more information about Porter's long life and career will appreciate the 21-page "Chronology" placed at the end of this 1100-page book that details her ninety-year lifetime.

Porter was often a critic of her times, but she took her criticism a step or two further by her general criticism of society and even of human nature itself. She was most certainly a keen observer of people, and some of her best stories are the often deceptively simple ones that focus on the unique relationship between husbands and wives. These are largely conversational presentations that clearly illustrate just how much is left unsaid in a marriage, stories in which real feelings are shown inside the heads of her main characters but never expressed out loud in the long conversations between husband and wife. Two particularly fine examples of this type are Porter's "Rope" and "The Cracked Looking Glass," both of which were included in her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories.

Porter, born in Indian Creek, Texas, near San Antonio, had the familiarity and love for Mexico shared by so many Texans. Her earliest published short stories are set during the Mexican Revolution years between 1910 and 1920, and her nonfiction pieces include more than two dozen essays on her love for that country and what she experienced there during such a dramatic period of its history. That Porter felt as much at home in Mexico as in Texas is obvious because of the depth to which she captured these times and Mexico's people.

The last publication of Porter's lifetime, 1977's "The Never-Ending Wrong," her reaction to the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, is perhaps one of the most powerful pieces she ever wrote. Porter, who stood with hundreds of others outside the prison while the two were executed for their crime, admits that she could not determine for herself their actual guilt or innocence. But she makes a strong argument that their trial was one of those "in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place." She likens their trial to the trials of Jesus, Joan of Arc, those tried in Salem during the infamous witchcraft trials of 1692, and those condemned to death by Stalin in his 1937 Moscow show trials.

Collected Stories and Other Writings should help solidify Katherine Anne Porter's literary reputation for generations to come, something that was becoming more and more difficult to do because so much of her work was out-of-print prior to this publication. Darlene Unrue has placed a wide range of Porter's best work in one volume, a book that will prove to be a must-have for Porter fans and an important book for anyone who appreciates the best short fiction produced in the twentieth century.

The Library of America continues its hallowed tradition of preserving the writings of classic American authors in quality hardbound, ribbon-bookmarked editions with Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings, an anthology of works by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Katherine Anne Porter. Not only are all twenty-six of her stories included, but also a wealth of her essays, reviews, and other writings, ranging from musings on the act of writing itself to observations about Mexico. Extensive notes and a chronology round out this compact, definitive volume. The definitive edition of Katherine Anne Porter's written works, enthusiastically recommended for both library and private collections.

Katherine Anne Porter is a wonderful writer who deserves better than this Library of America hardcover edition, which is a bibliological disaster. For $30 ($40 list!) the reader should get something bigger than a paperback (actually, many softcover collections are bigger than this -- Eudora Welty's collected stories, for example). The paper is so thin you can see what's on the other side. The margins are so skimpy that the type disappears into the crack between the pages unless you make an effort to force the book wide open, and even then you have to read around a curve at the start or end of each line. This is a collection that needs to be recollected.