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Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890. She grew up living in both Texas and Louisiana.  Her mother died when she was only two. Her paternal grandparents raised her and educated her in convent schools.  She ran away from home to marry when she was sixteen. She ended the marriage to pursue an acting career.  During this time she contracted tuberculosis and upon her slow recovery she turned to writing.  Her writing was met with more success than she found in acting. Porter earned her living as a journalist in Chicago, Illinois, and Denver, Colorado.

Between the years 1918 and 1921 she was a teacher and a journalist in Mexico, the location of many of her stories.  She became involved in revolutionary politics in Mexico.  Her feelings toward Mexico, however, were ambivalent. Sometimes her stories express hope for the country, other times, as in “The Fiesta of Guadalupe,” she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples.

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In 1922 Porter published a study Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts.  She also contributed to leftist journals, such as The New Republic and The Nation. At this time, her writings were receiving more publication opportunities and recognition. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” appeared in transition in 1929 and ‘Flowering Judas’  was first published in the Hound and Horn in 1930. Porter’s first collection of short stories was Flowering Judas. This collection demonstrates her style of unique clarity.

Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, published in 1939 won widespread critical acclaim. It consisted of three short novels: ‘Old Mortality’, ‘Noon Wine’, and the title piece, which tells of a brief love affair between a soldier and a young Southern newspaperwoman during the influenza outbreak of World War I.

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Her Collected Works, published in 1965 earned her the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.  Ship of Fools, Porter’s  most beloved work, was completed when Porter was 72.  Ship of Fools is an acrimoniously ironic novel set in 1931 aboard a German passenger ship, returning to Germany from Mexico.  Through a figurative use of characters, Porter considers the origin of good and evil.  In 1966, the novel was made into an Oscar winning film.

Katherine Anne Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980.

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