| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780151707553 | | Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company | | Publish Date: 4/1/1990 | | Buy.com Sku: 30018910 | | Item#: R75SWN | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.75L x 0.5T |
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| | | First published in 1939, these three short novels secured the author's reputation as a master of short fiction.
Annotation:
Three novellas, written after Porter's return from her four-year stay in Paris. "From there," she said in a letter, "I got a perspective and somehow without struggle my point-of-view fell into clear focus..." The three novellas are "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", drawn directly from Porter's experience of near-death from influenza in the 1918 epidemic; "Noon Wine", widely considered to be one of her best works, about a hapless farmer who inadvertently comes into conflict with a stranger and ends up killing both him and himself; and "Old Mortality", another of Porter's tales of young Miranda, her perennial autobiographical stand-in.
| Author Bio| Katherine Anne Porter | | Katherine Anne Porter was born Collie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, a descendant of pioneers. Her mother died when she was 2, and she was raised by her father and her paternal grandmother. Porter tended to lie about the facts of her life, but it seems fairly clear that she ran away from school to marry at 16--to whom is not known. Divorced after three years, Porter moved to Chicago, where she worked as a newspaper reporter, then back to Texas, where she claimed to have made her living as a traveling balladeer. In Colorado during the 1918 influenza epidemic, she nearly died, and felt that her brush with death changed her profoundly. In the words of Elizabeth Hardwick, Porter "was a woman who was not made for marriage and thus married three times." She was intensely involved in various political causes, and often lived in Europe and Mexico--but little of this is reflected in her fiction. Eventually, she became a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Despite her somewhat reckless and self-indulgent life, she lived to be 90. |
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