Katherine Anne Porter: A Life By Joan Givner Simon & Schuster, 572 pp., $19.95
No literary biographer worth his salt could ask for a more promising subject than Katherine Anne Porter, the undisputed grande dame of Southern lettersand a formidable character by anyone’s reckoning. Her life was full of contradictions—the kind that make for good reading. She was regarded as one of the most important writers of her time; yet her reputation rests on three volumes of short stories, a handful of first-rate essays, and one famously uneven novel —a slender corpus for an ostensibly major author. She lived through a seemingly endless procession of marriages, divorces, and promiscuous interludes; yet she paid lip service to Catholicism throughout it all. She was a compulsive liar whenever the subject was herself; yet she spent her later years in search of a satisfactory biographer.
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