The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

“It was, I think, the fact that I had participated in death and I knew what death was and had almost experienced it,” she continued. “Now, if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there's no use deceiving yourself that you are.”

Katherine Anne Porter spoke in a 1963 interview about the time she contracted influenza during the 1919 resurgence of the pandemic. Subsequently, she wrote the novella for which she is most famous, Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

I came to this collection intrigued by the pandemic theme of this story and by the fact that Porter is a Texan, but I left with a deep appreciation for Porter's writing. Porter sees the world and she writes just what she sees. She doesn't stick to writing from within her own narrow culture of her time, either; somehow she is able to sneak little glimpses of other cultures, too.

V. S. Pritchett wrote of Porter in the New Statesman: “Miss Porter's singularity as a writer is in her truthful explorations of a complete consciousness of life. Her prose is severe and exact; her ironies are subtle but hard....” Yes.