UNLV English professor Darlene Unrue has published a major new biography: Katherine Anne Porter: the Life of an Artist ($30). Curious about what made Porter worth Unrue's time and energy (1), what surprised Unrue about her subject (2) and her research methods (3), we checked in with the good professor. Her responses:
1) In the mid-1970s, after teaching Porter's short stories in several UNLV classes, I began publishing critical articles on her fiction. In 1976 I was invited to a symposium at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas (the university closest to her birthplace, Indian Creek), where Porter had been invited to receive an honorary degree. I met her then and at about the same time began working on a critical book on her fiction. By the time that book (Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction) was published in 1985, I had begun researching her life because I had concluded that her life and art were inextricably linked. I also began to see that the published biographical record was filled with gaps and errors. By the early 1990s, after publishing another critical book on her work and an edition of her uncollected book reviews, I began a biography in earnest. I saw it as an opportunity to correct the record and also to re-envision the themes of the life of one of the 20th century's most brilliant fictional stylists and fascinating women. She was fascinating not only as a modern woman struggling to support herself with her writing but as a human being caught up in most of the major events of the 20th century.
(2) I learned a great deal about Porter that had not been known. For example, she was married five times (instead of the three she admitted to), and she lost children in all the ways one can (including abortion). I also learned that near the turn of the 19th century her maternal grandmother was institutionalized in the San Antonio Lunatic Asylum, past which she walked many times, an experience that accounted for her lifelong fear of insanity. Her failures at marriage and motherhood were other deeply hidden traumas, I believe, out of which much of her art emerged.
(3) I spent considerable time in Mexico researching her years there, and I also did research in Paris, Madrid, Basel (Switzerland), Rome, Berlin and Bermuda, in addition to many places throughout the U.S. I also interviewed many persons who knew Porter well, including Eudora Welty.