Books

This is the 186th volume in the Library of America series, the splendid publishing venture that makes classic and not-so-classic American authors available to the general reader. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), who had opinions about everything, would undoubtedly be pleased to see her work appear in such a venue, but she would also no doubt bridle at having to be preceded by the likes of Philip K. Dick (no. 183), Dawn Powell (nos. 126/127), and H.P. Lovecraft (no. 155).

Expertly edited by Porter's recent and best biographer, Darlene Harbour Unrue, the collection gives us generous portions of the author's fiction, essays, literary criticism and some priceless autobiographical pieces.

Another bonus of Ms. Unrue's editing is a detailed 20-page chronology of Porter's life. The only thing lacking, in my view, is a sampling of Porter's letters, especially the ones she wrote during and after a visit to Texas in 1936. These fascinating pictures of her family, Kyle, San Marcos and surrounding areas are available in a volume of her letters published back in the early 1990s.

That Katherine Anne Porter became a writer at all is fairly astounding. She lost her mother when she was 2, but fortunately she came under the care of a powerful grandmother who held her son's family together for 10 crucial years of Porter's childhood. At 16 Porter made what would prove to be a very bad marriage. Her husband cheated on her, drank too much and physically abused her.

Porter was good at marrying but not so good at marriages that would last. None of the four – or is it five? – endured. Porter escaped her first one in 1915. She cheated death itself in a hospital in Denver in 1918, when she was given up for dead from a case of influenza.

Then began Porter's true journey to literary fame. She had begun to educate herself by reading the best of modern writing. While still in Texas, in Corpus Christi of all places, she discovered books by Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and later she would come to know personally many of the best and brightest writers of her time.

Instead of going to Paris as everybody was doing in the 1920s, she went to Mexico, and her first forays into published fiction were stories set in that revolutionary country: "María Concepción," "Virgin Violeta," "Flowering Judas," "Hacienda," all of which appeared in her first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), along with such famous works set vaguely in the South, such as "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and "He," one of the darkest stories in anybody's oeuvre.

Unlike hundreds of writers at the outset of their careers, Porter did not write about herself. She waited until later, in early middle age, when she turned to her family life in Texas to forge what I consider to be her greatest stories. These include a sequence titled "The Old Order" that appeared in the 1944 collection, The Leaning Tower and Other Stories.

Most of these works focus on a young girl named Miranda (in some respects the author's alter ego), and in the best of these, "The Grave," Porter brings the Texas of her childhood blazingly alive. It is one of the great short stories in American literature.

In 1939 she added three more gems of Texas-inflected work: "Old Mortality," "Noon Wine," and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." These novellas, which she insisted on calling "short novels," were published under the title Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In the tiny world of Texas literary history, the book has a legendary status, not because it won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for 1939 but because it lost, to J. Frank Dobie's Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Read the two volumes back to back if you want to see a prime instance of literary chauvinism in the Lone Star State.

Thanks to this collection, Ms. Unrue's biography, and a couple of decades of literary scholarship here in Texas, we have a much better understanding of Porter's life and career so that it is time, once and for all, to embrace the fact that she is one of our greatest writers.

Don Graham has written extensively about Texas culture. His latest book is State Fare: An Irreverent Guide to Texas Movies (TCU Press, 2008).

Collected Stories and Other Writings

Edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue

(Library of America, $40)

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