"I practiced writing in every possible way that I could," Katherine Anne Porter once told Barbara Thompson in a Paris Review interview. "This has been the intact line of my life which directs my actions, determines my point of view, profoundly affects my character and personality, my social beliefs and economic status and the kind of friendships I form. . . . For this vocation I was and am willing to live and die, and I consider very few other things of the slightest importance." Porter was, above all else, a writer's writer and although her output was relatively small, Porter was one of the most recognized and acclaimed American writers of short fiction by the mid-twentieth century. In 1966 she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, many of which were written between 1922 and 1940. Porter also authored one novel, Ship of...