Best Selling Books by Katherine Anne Porter

Porter''s reputation as one of americanca''s most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

This volume brings together 29 pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appear in her collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Includes both fiction and essays.

Katherine Anne Porter''s Poetry makes available for the first time the complete poetic canon of one of America''s most-celebrated writers. Widely known and revered for her award-winning short stories, Porter published just thirty-two poems and poetry translations during her lifetime, although she composed - and subsequently destroyed - hundreds. Her poetry is virtually unknown even by her most devoted followers. From fragmentary notes and letters found among Porter''s papers, Darlene Harbour Unrue has recovered and edited eighteen unpublished poems. In a significant addition to the Porter canon, these newly found poems join Porter''s published verse - including the entire text of the now-rare Katherine Anne Porter''s French Song-Book - to create a unique commentary on the writer''s life and work. Interspersed with photographs of Porter from the years and places in which she composed the poems, the volume features a substantial critical and biographical essay in which Unrue explains the significance of individual poems and details the relationship between Porter''s poetry and fiction. Unrue describes Porter''s verse as an index to the stages of her developing intellectual thought and, in some cases, an intermediate phase in a creative process that began with random notes and letters and culminated in fiction.

The Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning volume of writings from the author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider—now combined with little-known works of prose for the very first time Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter “writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, “many are unsurpassed in modern fiction.” The Library of America now reprints the landmark 1965 volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter—which features tales like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and “Flowering Judas”—and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter’s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Selected letters between Porter and fellow writers trace her development as a writer and reveal her outlook on life.

This “dazzling” National Book Award finalist set aboard an ocean liner in 1931 reflects the passions and prejudices that sparked World War II (San Francisco Chronicle). August 1931. An ocean liner bound for Germany sets out from the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The ship’s first-class passengers include an idealistic young American painter and her lover; a Spanish dance troupe with a sideline in larceny; an elderly German couple and their fat, seasick bulldog; and a boisterous band of Cuban medical students. As the Vera journeys across the Atlantic, the incidents and intrigues of several dozen passengers and crew members come into razor-sharp focus. The result is a richly drawn portrait of the human condition in all its complexity and a mesmerizing snapshot of a world drifting toward disaster. Written over a span of twenty years and based on the diary Katherine Anne Porter kept during a similar ocean voyage, Ship of Fools was the bestselling novel of 1962 and the inspiration for an Academy Award–winning film starring Vivien Leigh. It is a masterpiece of American literature as captivating today as when it was first published more than a half century ago. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Katherine Anne Porter, including rare photos from the University of Maryland Libraries.

Between 1920 and 1958 Katherine Anne Porter published more than sixty-five book review, many of which are now largely inaccessible. Although several such pieces have appeared in earlier collections of Porter''s nonfiction writings, never have so many of Porter''s reviews--nearly fifty--been made available in a single volume. Collectively the review reveal Porter''s opinions on topics ranging from the nature of art and the place of the artist in politics and society to feminism and the role of female artists. Particularly evident in the reviews are the critical principles that guided her own work as well as her judgments of the works of other writers. In her introductory essay Darlene Harbour Unrue provides important biographical information on Porter, traces her career as a reviewer, and links critical assumptions in the reviews to the themes and techniques of Porter''s fiction. Other scholars as well have regarded Porter''s critical reviews as valuable tools both for analyzing the fiction and for constructing a portrait of Porter the artist, primarily because Porter produced so little fiction (three collections of short stories and novellas, Flowering Judas, The Leaning Tower, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and a novel, Ship of Fools). In the preface to the first collection of her nonfiction writings, The Days Before, Porter herself urged readers to look closely at her nonfiction, for there they would discover "the shape, direction, and connective tissue of a continuous, central interest and preoccupation of a lifetime." Most of the reviews--which appeared in such publications as the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Nation, and New Masses--she apparently undertook for financial reasons, but occasionally she would agree to review a friend''s latest offering. She published no reviews after the success of her best-selling novel, Ship of Fools. Porter''s scope as a reviewer was impressively broad. Because she lived in Mexico City during the revolution, had known Diego Rivera, and had studied "primitive" Mexican art, she was often called on to review books on Mexican art and on the revolution. Porter also reviewed many books by or about women. Her reviews of the Short Novels of Colette and Katharine Anthony''s translation of Catherine the Great''s memoirs are particularly noteworthy for her comments about women artists and her expression of admiration for women who flout traditional roles. These collected reviews illustrate the evolution of one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and will interest not only Porter scholars but also anyone who appreciates her fiction.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) produced a relatively small body of fiction, but she wrote thousands and thousands of letters. The present selection of 135 unexpurgated letters, written to seventy-four different persons, begins with a 1916 letter written from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Texas and ends with a 1979 letter dictated to an unnamed nursing-home attendant in Maryland. Different from any previous selection, this body of letters does not omit Porter''s frank criticism of fellow writers and spans her entire life. Within that circumscription is the chronicle of Porter, a twentieth-century woman searching for love while she struggles to become the writer she is sure she can be. Porter''s letters vividly showcase the twentieth century as the writer observes it from her historical vantage points--tuberculosis sanatoria and the influenza pandemic of 1918; the leftist community in Greenwich Village in the 1920s; the Mexican cultural revolution of the 1920s and early 1930s; the expatriate community in Paris in the 1930s; the rise of Nazism in Europe between the World Wars; the Second World War and its concomitant suppression of civil liberties; Hollywood and the university circuit as a haven for financially strapped writers in the 1940s and 1950s; the Cold War and its competition for supremacy in space; the Women''s Rights and the Civil Rights movements; and the evolution and demise of literary modernism.

A first collection of thirty-three pieces which have appeared in various publications over the past thirty years and repesent the critical interests and personal taste of a writer who is a scrupulous stylist. Acknowledging her preference for the "conscious, disciplined artist", it is natural that Henry James, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, Rilke, and Edith Sitwell attract a scrutiny which is appreciative as well as evaluative. And the title piece which returns to the childhood of Henry James and refers to the "first affections and attachments and admirations" never forgotten is particularly fine. The second section of essays, "Personal and Particular," range from a Louisiana landscape to a rose, from some considerations on love and marriage to the atom bomb--and she concludes the volume with a series of Mexican pieces which include a longer critique of the Mexican revolutionary writer Lizardi. Katherine Anne Porter is a discriminating writer, for a discriminating audience, and these pieces, fastidious in discernment, subtle in judgment, have a definite destination.

Anthology of the distinguished American author''s essays, biographical memoirs and poems on such diverse subjects as Thomas Hardy, marriage, the creative process and Dylan Thomas.

The Library of America presents an exclusive e-book edition of the astonishing 1930 collection that introduced a major new voice in American literature. “If Katherine Anne Porter had written nothing but these short narratives," observed the New York Times, "she would be among the most distinguished masters of her craft in this country.”

Manuscript, Katherine Anne Porter ghostwrote Mae''s story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient. Asia published My Chinese Marriage as a four-part series, and subsequently Duffield and Company published it unchanged in book form. Mae Franking''s original manuscript was lost, so there can be no direct comparison between Franking''s manuscript and Porter''s work. This annotated edition contains the full text of My Chinese Marriage as it appeared in Asia. In.

The classic 1944 collection of ten short stories by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and journalist Incomparable in their dramatic clarity and emotional force, the ten gems in this collection affirm Katherine Anne Porter’s genius for writing stories, as Eudora Welty observed, “with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” The collection includes The Old Order, a sequence of short stories that paints a devastating portrait of the racial inequities that plague life in the American South, as well as other selected stories such as “The Leaning Tower” and “The Downward Path to Wisdom”.

These six short novels are as different from each other as any great work of fiction can be. But despite differences, all share that one element--the unmistakable ring of human truth--that marks each of them as a masterpiece. Novels include The Dead by James Joyce, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter, The Overcoat by Nikolay Gogol, The Pilgrim Hawk by Glen Wescott, and The Bear by William Faulkner.

She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere'' A tender story of devotion, resentment and ennui from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.