Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter
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 who 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.
Darlene Harbour Unrue’s meticulously and expertly edited Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter is the collection of uncut correspondence covering the full range of Porter’s life that we have needed for so long. Unrue’s judicious selections reveal Porter as an extraordinarily talented and careful epistolary craftswoman whose letters are as entertaining as they are literate. Because her correspondents included many of the leading literary figures of the twentieth century and because her own long life was so eventful, the collection is as valuable as a cultural history as it is as a personal history of the people and incidents that lie behind her remarkable fiction.
Darlene Harbour Unrue is professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has authored or edited several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Understanding Katherine Anne Porter, and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Unrue’s work has also been published in The Southern Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, and The Henry James Review.
