Katherine Anne Porter: A Life

Katherine Anne Porter was as fascinating a character as any fictional work she ever created. Self-educated, she wrote some of the most complex and well-crafted short stories of her time and concocted a personal image of glamour and refinement despite her very modest origins. As multi-married as a movie queen, she bewitched dozens of men, marrying some of them decades her junior. Hindsight has withered the illusion of her physical appeal, despite all the talk of her beauty, her photographs to contemporary non-bewitched eyes reveal a woman deep into middle age despite her chic poses. Past forty when she burst on to the literary scene in the 1930's, Porter live in genteel poverty until she hit the jackpot in her seventies with epic novel A SHIP OF FOOLS earning her millions. She would go on for almost another two decades before she died at age 90 in 1980. Sharply opinionated and seemingly easy to anger, Porter nevertheless could be a great friend as she was to Robert Penn Warren and the novice Eudora Welty. This book is a fascinating, detailed account of her long life. Author Givner has since taken a more negative personal view of Porter in other works, fortunately here she seems to admire this woman who carved a major place in the world of letters for herself from very humble beginnings.

When reading Porter's fiction, we cannot help but acknowledge that she was a consummate stylist. We marvel at her narrative voice as she fleshes out characters such as Miranda Gay, Maria Concepcion, or Granny Weatherall, and in recognizing this, one must congratulate Joan Givner for realizing that Porter, when it came to her own life, was also a stylist in her creation of a feminine literary persona, a persona so potent that only the most perservering of biographers can penetrate it. Givner has done just that in her work. Because of her tenacious research and attention to detail, she gives us a study that is often anecdotal but always honest, and no doubt that combination makes for a great biographical read. She gives us the real Porter, and at the same time never lets us forget that when Porter did find the time to write, she was one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century.