Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas, to honor the life and career of Porter.
Biography
Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russel Porter to Harrison Boone Porter and Mary Alice (Jones) Porter. Her family tree can be traced back to American frontiersman Daniel Boone and the writer O. Henry (whose real name was William Sydney Porter), her father's second cousin.
In 1892, when Porter was two years old, her mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's father took his four surviving children (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas. The depth of her grandmother's influence can be inferred from Porter's later adoption of her name. Her grandmother died while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas.
"Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning."
"Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it."
"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction."
"A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being."
"Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you."
"There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own."
"The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own -even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being."
"Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined."
"You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence."
"I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have religious training. And I suppose you don't say, "I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal, but of course it does."
"They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not."
"I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that."
Truman Capote was a born writer who died a celebrity, a downfall that has always seemed particularly painful to me because it was Capote the writer who changed my life ...Powers, KatherineAnnePorter and Joan Didion all vied for attention ... Soft-spoken ... .
Then he returned to tell the tale ... To put it mildly ... Although it's Schlich's first novel, it's his second work of fiction, following "QuantumConvention," a collection of stories that won the KatherineAnnePorter Prize in ShortFiction ... [LINK ... .
After a 30-minutes probable cause hearing on Tuesday, BullittDistrict JudgeJenniferPorter heard enough evidence to send the case against Tiffanie Ann KatherineLucas, 32, to the grand jury for possible indictment.
After a 30-minutes probable cause hearing on Tuesday, BullittDistrict JudgeJenniferPorter heard enough evidence to send the case against Tiffanie Ann KatherineLucas, 32, to the grand jury for possible indictment.
His host, the short story writer KatherineAnnePorter, quickly took a photograph ... Porter’s photograph of Hart connects five new friends ... One portrait was sent as a keepsake to Hart and Porter’s friend, Ernie O’Malley, the former IRA officer.
The Pioneer News
14 Nov 2023
The Pioneer News
14 Nov 2023