Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter: Chronicles of a Modern Woman

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."