Katherine Anne Porter
(May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980)

3106 P St. NW, Georgetown neighborhood, DC.

The Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer briefly lived in the DC area in the 1940s and then from 1959 until her death in 1980.

Porter began writing in 1915, while spending two years in a tuberculosis sanatorium (where she was mistakenly sent while suffering from bronchitis). In 1919, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she became a radical, and befriended several prominent leftists. In 1945, she was appointed to a seven-month Fellowship of Regional American Literature at the Library of Congress. Between 1948 and 1958, she taught at universities, including Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Washington and Lee. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1966.

Porter is the author of one novel, Ship of Fools (1962), three novellas, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and three collections of short fiction, including Flowering Judas (1930), and The Collected Stories (1965).

The Porter Room at McKeldin Library, part of the special collections of the University of Maryland, contains Porter's personal collection of books, plus an oil portrait of the author and select personal belongings. The University also hosts the Katherine Anne Porter Society.

Katherine Anne Porter Society
The Baltimore Literary Heritage Project

Photo of author courtesy of Library of Congress.