Katherine Anne Porter - Research Paper Example

She spent almost a century long life during which she bestowed several outstanding literary pieces to the American literature. She was awarded with several prizes in her life and even after her death people remember and appraise her through different nominations and awards. She was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her work The Collected Stories published in 1965. The same collection won him the National Book Award in 1966. In 2967 she was awarded with the Gold Medal Award for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature for three times. On May15, 2006 she was featured on the United States postage stamp after which she became the 22nd personality to be features in the Literary Arts stamp series (Bloom, p3). Anne Porter was born on May 15, 1980 in Indian Creek Texas. She was named as Callie Russell Porter. Her mother was dead when she was just two years old. She lived with her grandmother Catherine Ann for some years and after her death she moved with her family to different relatives and rental rooms in Texas and Louisiana (Porter and Givner, p2).

The personality of grandmother had very strong impact upon the life of Porter and she always reflect love and affection for her grandmother. She changed her name to adopt the name of her grandmother and renamed her as Katherine Anne Porter (Benedict West, p12). Her childhood was spent moving from one place to another with the family and her education was also affected from this movement. She enrolled in different free schools wherever the family moves. In 1904 she attended the Thomas School for one year in Texas that was her only formal education beyond the grammar school.

In 1906, she was sixteen when she left her home to marry son of a wealthy ranching family John Henry Koontz however, the marriage turned out painful experience for her because Koontz physically abused her and once drunk he also threw her down the stairs (Porter and Givner, p2). Her ankle was broke in this incident and nine years after the marriage they were officially divorced in 1915. She married again for some times but none of her marriages lasted for long time. She never had children but she went through the painful experiences of abortion, miscarriage and stillbirth (Stout, p32).

In 1915, she moved to Chicago where she worked as extra in movies and then starter her career as singer and actress. In 1915, she was also diagnosed with tuberculosis due to which she had to spend two years in sanatoria. This was a turning point in her life because she decided to become a writer and began writing in 1917. She started writing for Fort Worth Critic in which she review and criticize dramas and write social gossips. In 1918, she started writing for Rocky Mountain News. The same year she deadly suffered with flu during which she remained in hospital for month.

When she was discharged she was completely bald and frail. Her hair grew back in white color and remained white for the rest of her life. The time she spent in the hospital provided her with several deep observations and experienced that she later shared in her long story Pale Horse, Pale Rider. She started ghost writing in 1919 when she moved to New York City and initiated writing children stories and publicity work for a motion picture company. At this time she also developed