Katherine Anne Porter (1890--1980) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She pulled herself up from a life of hardship, dislocation, and severe loss in rural Texas to become a major American author and one of the most compelling literary figures of the twentieth century. Her first and only novel, Ship of Fools, was published in 1962 and became the bestselling novel in America that year, bringing her national literary fame. In 1967 she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. |
