SOURCE: "One Fixed Desire," in Commonweal, Vol. CXVIII, No. 8, April 19, 1991, pp. 266-7.

In the following review, Hosmer praises the publication of Letters of Katherine Anne Porter.

W. H. Auden was "an unusually stinking and opinionated sodomite"; Charlie Chaplin "an odious little beast"; T. S. Eliot "a dry damned soul who packs an awful wallop"; Edmund Wilson "a mere goon"; and as for Carson McCullers, well, her first book was the product of "a peculiarly corrupt mind, a small stunted talent incapable of growth, and her further work has borne this out in my mind." Whose mind? Katherine Anne Porter's. And so it goes in this six-hundred-page collection, a mere selection from the letters of an important American writer: in her editor's note, Isabel Bayley, Porter's literary executor since 1974, informs us that there were "thousands" of letters from the period of 1930 to 1963, the writer's major working years. Bayley's work...