The modernist movement profoundly affected American writers in the early twentieth century. This movement, swept along by disillusionment with traditions that seemed to have become spiritually empty, called for bold experimentation and a sweeping rejection of all traditional themes and old styles. As idealism was turning into cynicism, two American voices in fiction - Katherine Anne Porter and William Faulkner - began to question authority and tradition which had seemed America's bedrock.

Katherine Anne Porter's, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," addresses many new characteristics of the time period. Porter presents a Southern woman, Granny Weatherall, caught up in a web of custom and obligation. Granny Weatherall is eighty years old and she has absolutely no interest in the future, which she knows is over for her. The past, however, plays an important role in her thoughts as she lay on her death bed. In this aspect, Porter also...