Katherine Anne Porter is among the most distinguished writers of American fiction. Her stories and short novels are meticulously crafted in the tradition of Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce, and they have earned her the championship of such eminent critics as Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Robert Penn Warren. Her fictional output is not large, numbering only twenty-six short works and one novel, but this limitation is in itself a considerable part of her reputation, seeming to suggest that she would not function at anything but the highest level of her art.

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, Porter was the fourth of five children. After her mother's death in 1892, her family moved to Kyle in Hays County, Texas, where Porter was raised by her grandmother until the grandmother's death in 1901, and thereafter the family lived in San Antonio, where Porter attended the Thomas...