Katherine Porter Research Paper

According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Katherine Anne Porter was born on May 15, 1890 in Indian Creek, Texas. She was the fourth of five children of Harrison Bone Porter and Mary Alice Jones. Around the age of two, Katherine’s mother passed away and her and her siblings went to live with their grandmother. Nine years later, Katherine’s grandmother passed away and the Katherine was sent to several different Convent schools in Texas and in Louisiana. In 1906, at the age of fifteen, Porter ran away from school and married John Henry Koontz, the first of four husbands, which she then later divorced three years later. In 1914 she went to Chicago, Illinois to pursue an acting career, later that year though she returned to Texas and briefly worked as a singer. Ever since her early childhood Porter had been writing stories, she claimed that writing stories was, “the passions of her life”.

After she got better, she took a trip to Mexico and published her first work of fiction, a short story called María Concepcíon. Porter’s first volume of stories, Flowering Judas (1930) was impressive according to critics, but it did not sell well. Though this first volume did not sell well, it did win the Guggenheim fellowship which Katherine used the money she received from this to study abroad. After a short trip to Bremerhaven, Germany Katherine used this trip to base the setting of her only novel, Ship of Fools which took over two decades to write. She went on to write her second volume of stories, Hacienda (1934) and a short novel, Noon Wine (1937). Katherine wrote Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1942) which was a collection of three short novels, which dealt with the German political