Katherine Anne Porter: A Life - Hardcover

Joan Givner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671432079 ISBN 13: 9780671432072

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1982

Synopsis

A full-scale biography of one of American literature's most enigmatic figures portrays the award-winning fiction writer through all the drama, passion, excitement, and carefully constructed fiction of her ninety-year life

About this title

About the Author:

Joan Givner is the author of biographies, essays, and fiction. Her work includes "Katherine Anne Porter: A Life" (Georgia) and "Katherine Anne Porter Conversations." A native of England now living in Canada, Givner taught English literature at the University of Regina before retiring to British Columbia.

Review:

This is the story of how a renowned American writer made up a grand old-South lineage for herself and otherwise mythologized her life. . . . In this new edition, the author has uncovered more details about such matters as her subject's bout with tuberculosis, which she now regards as 'crucial to the emergence of Porter as an artist.'

(Washington Post)

Givner's most dramatic feat is to explode the many legends invented by Porter. . . . But the unvarnished truth only sharpens one's sense of Porter's accomplishment.

(New York Review of Books)

There were a multiplicity of Katherine Anne Porters, and thankfully Joan Givner has refrained from reducing them to one. With patience and understanding, she presents this woman as the 'aristocratic first lady of American letters, linguist, musician, femme fatale, and raconteur,' destined perhaps for rediscovery by a new generation of readers.

(Christian Science Monitor)

Long before her death in 1980, Porter had earned the reputation of being a fine, though maddeningly slow, writer and the greatest female liar of the century. . . . Givner's admirable biography weaves together the facts of Porter's deliberately extravagant, sometimes sordid life.

(Atlantic Monthly)

It remains the only definitive work on Porter's life, and I cannot imagine any Porter scholar nowadays who does not consult it routinely.

(Darlene Harbour Unrue)

The reflection Joan Givner's book chiefly prompts is wonder at the way in which such a disordered, tempestuous, hard-drinking, often frustrated life produced so assured and serene an art.

(Times Literary Supplement)

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0671432079
• ISBN 13: 9780671432072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 572