Katherine Anne Porter, 1890 - 1980

Writer Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). Her mother died when she was two years old, and her father didn’t pay much attention to young Callie or her brothers and sisters. She was raised by her grandmother, Catherine Anne Skaggs, in the town of Kyle, which had about 500 people. Catherine Anne Skaggs traced her family back to Daniel Boone. Porter wrote later: "Grandmother was by nature lavish, she loved leisure and calm, she loved luxury, she loved dress and adornment, she loved to sit and talk with friends or listen to music; she did not in the least like pinching or saving and mending and making things do. ... But the evil turn of fortune in her life tapped the bottomless reserves of her character." Porter grew up in poverty, but she soaked in her grandmother’s stories of the affluent family she had left behind in Kentucky, and a family history full of important and wealthy people. She described herself as "a precocious child full of miscellaneous talents and hellish energy."
But then her grandmother died, and Porter hated living with her father — they argued constantly and lived in squalid conditions, with Porter supporting both of them by giving lessons. So when she was 15 years old she ran off with a man named John Henry Koontz, who was from a wealthy ranching family. They got married just after her 16th birthday. The marriage was unhappy — Koontz was physically abusive, he had affairs, and he drank too much. Finally, after he beat her unconscious with a hairbrush, she decided she had to get out and she divorced him. In the divorce proceedings, Callie Porter changed her name to Katherine Porter, in honor of her grandmother, and soon started going as Katherine Anne Porter.
After a struggle with tuberculosis, Porter got a job writing for a newspaper in Fort Worth, then at the Rocky Mountain News. She barely survived the influenza epidemic, and afterwards she set out for a new life as a writer in Greenwich Village. In 1922, she sold her first short story to Century magazine, and in 1930 published her first book of short stories, Flowering Judas. Her writing got good reviews but not a lot of attention, until she published her first and only novel, Ship of Fools (1962),which came out on April Fools’ Day. It was the best-selling novel of 1962, and she finally had the financial security she had wanted for so long. Three years later, she published The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965), which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She died in 1980 at the age of 90.
Her friend Kitty Barry Crawford, who founded the Fort Worth Critic and inspired Porter to write, said of her friend: "I am frank to say, however, that K.A. as a person has always interested me more than her writings. She had and perhaps still has qualities of personality which lift her far, far above even highly talented people. Her delicate beauty — lovely black-lashed violet eyes, dark wavy hair, small nose, pertly snubbed — just to look at her was to love her."
Katherine Anne Porter said: "If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace."
In Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Porter wrote: "He had his uniforms made by the best tailor he could find, he confided to Miranda one day when she told him how squish he was looking in his new soldier suit. ‘Hard enough to make anything of the outfit, anyhow,’ he told her. ‘It’s the least I can do for my beloved country, not to go around looking like a tramp.’ He was twenty-four years old and a Second Lieutenant in an Engineers Corps, on leave because his outfit expected to be sent over shortly. ‘Came in to make my will,’ he told Miranda, ‘and get a supply of toothbrushes and razor blades. By what gorgeous luck do you suppose,’ he asked her, ‘I happened to pick on your rooming house? How did I know you were there?’
"Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could their small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper surface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on the earth at the same moment: ‘Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?’ and ‘I’m always in the mood for dancing, Adam!’ but there were thing in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go."