Katherine Anne Porter ranks among the most celebrated story writers of the twentieth century. Although she produced only twenty-seven stories and short novels, one long novel, several volumes of miscellaneous pieces, and an assortment of individually published book reviews, essays, and poems, from the time she burst onto the broad American literary scene in 1930 she was acclaimed for her crystalline prose and her incisive probing of the human condition. “My one aim,” she once said, “is to tell a straight story and give true testimony.” The themes of her fiction were the search for truth, betrayal (including self-betrayal), the ordeal of living in a changing and indeterminate social order, and the value of art and the artist. In 1944 she

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First published 04 February 2004

Citation: Unrue, Darlene Harbour. "Katherine Anne Porter". The Literary Encyclopedia. 4 February 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3608, accessed 20 November 2009.]