In the 1920s and ’30s, Katherine Anne Porter emerged as a classicist among the moderns, a lapidary miniaturist whose every short story was greeted as a thing of timeless perfection. Edmund Wilson called her “a first-rate artist” who wrote “English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary American fiction.” Her mastery of theme and gift for characterization were hers alone among the storywriters; even her shortest works were imbued with a richness of design, incident, and experience seldom found outside long novels. Her ambition and her range of emotion and effect—from cold realism to measureless compassion, from the plainspoken to the lyrical—were unequaled in her time and have had few successors. She was, and is forever, an American original.

Darlene Harbour Unrue, volume editor, is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author, most recently, of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist.

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