Katherine Anne Porter 's literary reputation rests on the twenty-seven stories in her Collected Stories (1964) rather than on the best-selling novel Ship of Fools (1962), on which she worked intermittently for thirty years. She was one of the most brilliant practitioners of the art of the short story, and, because of her style (personal as well as literary), she was an important influence on the generation of writers that followed her, which included William Humphrey, William Goyen, Tillie Olsen, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. During Porter's lifetime, critical response was skewed by her flamboyant personality and by the distortions in her biographical record. She was seen as an aristocratic daughter of the Old South whose depictions of the Plain People were excursions into foreign territory. Critics treated her in a manner befitting an exquisite southern belle, vying in their praises. She was subjected to little rigorous criticism...