No exploration of Katherine Anne Porter's "personality" … can explain the success of her art: the scrupulous and expressive intricacy of structure, the combination of a precision of language, the revealing shock of precise observation and organic metaphor, a vital rhythmic felicity of style, and a significant penetration of a governing idea into the remotest details of a work. If, as V. S. Pritchett has put it, the writer of short stories is concerned with "one thing that implies many"—or much—then we have here a most impressive artist.

How did Katherine Anne Porter transmute life finally into art? In her journal of 1936, she herself provided a most succinct, simple, and precise answer to the question. All her experience, she writes, seems to be simply in memory, with continuity, marginal notes, constant revision and comparison of one thing with another. But now comes the last phase, that of...