SOURCE: “Life after Life: Katherine Anne Porter's Version,” in Journal of Pop Culture, Vol. 14, No. 4, Spring, 1981, pp. 669–75.

In the following essay, Gernes explores the autobiographical nature of the death sequence in Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

“It's a true story …” Katherine Anne Porter responded to an interviewer's question about her short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. “It seems to me true that I died then, I died once, and I never have feared death since. …”¹ Porter's experience of “dying” took place in 1918 in the influenza epidemic that claimed more lives than the war that was coming to an end in Europe. She assigned the experience to her autobiographical protagonist, Miranda Rhea, in the short novel written in the later 1930s, and she told a Denver Post reporter in 1956 that she and not simply her character had “died once.” The death sequence from Pale Horse, Pale Rider has long...