Katherine Anne Porter: 1894-1980

Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas on May 15, 1894.

From her earliest childhood she was educated in convent schools of the South and, after graduation, worked as a newspaper reporter in Dallas and in Denver. Illness forced her to give up her career as a journalist. But she traveled extensively and lived in New York City, in Europe, and in Mexico.

At the age of sixteen she married John Henry Koontz, a member of a prosperous ranching family in Victoria County, Texas. The marriage was marked by her eventual conversion to the Roman Catholicism of the Koontz family and also by her husband's violent physical abuse. In 1914 she ran away to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in the movies before returning to Texas, appearing for several months in the backwoods of Texas and Louisiana as a ballad singer. In 1915 she divorced Koontz. Throughout her life she was married four more times.

Porter achieved acclaim with her first collection of stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, in 1930. Her most productive decade as a writer was the 1930s, when she published Noon Wine (1937) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939). She supported herself with lecture tours and teaching jobs at various universities while she worked on her novel Ship of Fools, which was published in 1962. It took her over two decades to complete this novel.

Ship of Fools is an episodic satire that traces the roots of Nazism while exploring the "ship of this world on its voyage to eternity". When Ship of Fools was finally published in 1962, reviews ranged from asserting that Porter's novel could be compared only with the greatest novels of the past hundred years much to the indignation of German reviewers, who called the novel a "document of hatred."

After several years of failing health, Katherine Anne Porter died September 18, 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland.