The Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (review)

1990 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-569
Author(s):  
W.J. Stuckey
Keyword(s):  
Katherine Anne Porter

Representations of Truth

Janus Head ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-225
Author(s):  
Heather Fox ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Katherine Anne Porter ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Reconstructive Process ◽  
Collective Meaning ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Over Time

Katherine Anne Porter submitted a group of stories called “Legend and Memory” to The Atlantic Monthly in 1934, but instead of the reception she hoped for, The Atlantic Monthly responded with a request for significant revisions. These recommendations, as Porter adamantly explained, would change the collective meaning of the stories. And yet, Porter ultimately chose to concede, publishing the stories separately in other magazines before finally collecting them together again in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944). Over the next twenty years, Porter would publish the stories (later called The Old Order stories) in two more collections— The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Each time she chose not to edit individual stories but rearranged the order of the stories. Individually, each story is like a sketch, or one component of the protagonist Miranda’s construct of identity from the perspective of an adult looking backward and remembering as a child. And yet collectively, these stories reveal memory’s process of reconstruction and how the perspective of time transforms event through addition, elimination, and arrangement. Using text, correspondence, manuscripts, and cognitive research to examine the progression of Porter’s work on The Old Order stories in three collections over more than thirty years, “Representations of Truth: The Significance of Order in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order Stories” traces the progressive ordering of these stories from their original submission to their final collection in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). This essay argues that Porter’s rearrangements reflect a reconstructive process of memory. Over time, the reorganization of The Old Order stories demonstrate a shift in Miranda’s memories from a chronological positioning to a representational ordering, allowing Miranda to reexamine her perspective on past experiences.

Tim O’Brien

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Calloway
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
United States Army ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Tim O'brien ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Katherine Anne Porter

Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) is a well-known contemporary American writer of seven novels, one memoir, and numerous short stories, nonfiction essays, and reviews. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and selections from The Things They Carried and other works are frequently anthologized in textbooks and short-st collections, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. One of three children, O’Brien lived in his birth town of Austin, Minnesota, until the age of ten when his family relocated to Worthington, Minnesota. After a public school education, he graduated from Macalaster College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, summa cum laude with a degree in political science. Shortly after graduation, his plans for graduate school were interrupted by the Vietnam War. The United States Army drafted O’Brien, and he served in Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. Upon his discharge from the military, O’Brien enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University, planning to study government, and worked briefly as a reporter for the Washington Post. When the short sketches that O’Brien published in magazines and newspapers while in Vietnam led to the publication of If I Die in A Combat Zone in 1973, O’Brien began a full-time writing career and left graduate school. His reputation was established in 1979 when he received the National Book Award for his second novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). In addition to that novel, his best-known work includes The Things They Carried (1990), which received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for fiction and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Estranger and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which received the novel of the year award from Time magazine and the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for outstanding historical novel. O’Brien has also received the National Magazine Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award, as well as numerous other accolades. In 2012 he received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2013 he had the distinction of becoming the first fiction writer to receive The Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. O’Brien is well known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact and for debating the issue of relative truth in his work while treating such universal subjects as love, death, the imagination, memory, the art of writing, aging, and war. While the topic of Vietnam emerges in all of O’Brien’s major works, he does not consider himself a war writer per se. Since 1999 O’Brien has taught creative writing at Texas State University. He continues to give readings and talks around the country.

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