SOURCE: “Southern Myth: A Note on ‘Noon Wine,’” in Louisiana Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1972, pp. 252–59.

In the following essay, Howell evaluates Porter as a Southern writer.

Although the body of Katherine Anne Porter's work has little regional implication and though Miss Porter has spent most of her adult life away from her native Texas, she has always acknowledged the importance of the regional in art and expressed satisfaction in her own provincial origin. In 1965, in an article in Harper's she declared the writers of the South and West are at the center of the American literary tradition—not those from the Eastern seaboard, who pour from their pens “unbelievable abominations” that no longer look like English but some dreadful perversion of it. They have fallen into “a curious kind of argot,” she says, “more or less originating in New York, a deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish...