Almanac of Story Tellers: Katherine Anne Porter

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of May 15th

 ___________________________________________________________________________

    It is the 135th day of the year, leaving 230 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1890, the author Katherine Anne Porter was born.    

   

    As Porter told her stories, she became the master of the short story, populating her pages with complex characters usually found only in the best of novels. She was a perfectionist with her prose, usually publishing in small magazines as a way to keep control of her artistry.

    After moving to New York in her early years, she worked as a journalist and ghost writer. She soon became caught up in the Mexican left, traveling back and forth to the country several times. This led to her first published short story, Maria Concepcion -- regarding a Mexican woman who kills a young girl who threatened her marriage. That put the woman's world back together, even as she changed from passive, hard-working teen-ager to a dominant, hard-bitten woman.

    The simultaneous existence of good and evil was among Porter's major themes. Others included the political and the personal, along with betrayal, justice, and the unforgiving nature of humans.

    Those themes came together in her first and only novel, Ship of Fools, published in 1962. It dealt with the ocean voyage of a group of Germans returning to Germany from Mexico in 1931, as Hitler rose to power. It was made into a movie in 1965.

    That was the same year she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Collected Stories. 

    Porter died in 1980 in Silver Spring, Md.