Katherine Anne Porter remains chiefly a writer's writer. Such a circumstance is a pity, for in her short stories and novelle she has a great deal to say to all intelligent readers; and she says it with clarity and beauty. She is by no means difficult to read; and, though her overzealous critics have made a few of her short stories seem overwrought with symbolism, there is actually little of the occult in her work. She has always lacked patience with the literary faddists—those people who affect newness of manner when they are actually destitute of matter. She writes in the main stream of English prose style and of English fiction without being imitative: a great achievement in itself. Her difficulty is an ironic one, though it involves no irony peculiar to her own time. In brief, she is a perfectionist, and perfectionists have rarely enjoyed popular...