Reception
"The work of so important a writer as Miss Porter must be judged by the lowest as well as the highest standards - and curiously enough, it is by the lowest standards that she fails. She is grave, she is delicate, she is just - but she lacks altogether the vulgar appeal. I cannot imagine she would ever make me cry, or laugh aloud. No doubt she would reply that she doesn't want to. But she should want to. I wish she would give herself a little more freely to the reader. I wish she would paint with broader, bolder strokes. I wish she wouldn't be so cautious." - Christopher Isherwood on Pale Horse, Pale Rider in The New Republic , April 19, 1939 [4]
Novelist Wallace Stegner praised "the absoluteness of technique and a felicity of language" that distinguished the stories in the collection:
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider", set in the influenza pandemic of 1918, and "Old Mortality", the indirectly told tragedy of a Southern belle, are as keen and polished as slim steel. Still, "Noon Wine" seems to me the best of the three, though not as perfectly proportioned…That story communicates; it has voltage. The other two, for all their perfection, seem to me to move away from the qualities that made Flowering Judas so exciting a book. [5] [6]
Time noted: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a collection of three short novels which belong with the best of contemporary U. S. writing in this difficult [literary] form. A distinctive book, it has the subtlety that has marked all of Miss Porter's writings, but not of the preciousness that had previously marred it." [7]
Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "Miss Porter writes little, and the subtlety of her art conceals its real strength: but she remains, after more than a decade in which she has baffled critics, one the great contemporary American writers." [8]
Biographer Darleen Harbour Unrue observed that Porter's short fiction received greater critical approval when they appeared in collections "that revealed their thematic integration." [9]
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"
The title story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is about the relationship between a newspaper woman, Miranda, and a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918. In the course of the narrative, Miranda becomes sick and delirious, but recovers, only to find that Adam has died of the disease, which he likely caught while tending to her. The story is set in Denver, Colorado. Porter herself lived for a time in Denver, where she wrote reviews for the Rocky Mountain News and was stricken with influenza. The historian Alfred W. Crosby considered Pale Horse, Pale Rider to be such an exceptional depiction of the suffering caused by the influenza that he dedicated his book about the 1918 epidemic to Porter. The author Robert Penn Warren said "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" was "at the top level, you know, in that collection of the world's short novels." [10]
The title comes from an African-American spiritual that the story references, which begins "Pale horse, pale rider, done took my lover away." The spiritual in turn is Biblical, coming from Revelation 6:1-8. There, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are the Conqueror on a white horse, War on a red horse, Famine on a black horse, and Death on a pale horse. Porter herself said that the title story was about the pale rider, Death, who takes away an entire era, as illustrated in the ironic last line: "Now there would be time for everything."
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, writer, environmentalist, and historian. He was often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. In 1966, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
Ship of Fools is a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter, telling the tale of a group of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German passenger ship. The large cast of characters includes Germans, Mexicans, Americans, Spaniards, a group of Cuban medical students, a Swiss family, and a Swede. In steerage is a large group of Spanish workers being returned to Spain from Cuba. It is an allegory tracing the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity".
Noon Wine is a 1937 short novel by American author Katherine Anne Porter. It initially appeared in a limited numbered edition of 250, all signed by the author and published by Shuman's. It later appeared in 1939 as part of Pale Horse, Pale Rider (ISBN 0-15-170755-3), a collection of three short novels by the author, including the title story and "Old Mortality." A dark tragedy about a farmer's futile act of homicide that leads to his own suicide, the story takes place on a small dairy farm in southern Texas during the 1890s. It has been filmed twice for television, in 1966 and 1985.
Josephine Herbst was an American writer and journalist, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. She was a radical with communist leanings, who "incorporate[d] the philosophy of socialism into her fiction" and "aligned herself with the political Left". She wrote "proletarian novels" conceived along the party line, "in Marxist terms" and described as a "subtle blend of art and propaganda."
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter is a volume of her previously published collections of fiction and four uncollected works of short fiction.
Daniyal Mueenuddin is a Pakistani-American author who writes in English. His short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has been translated into sixteen languages, and won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and critical acclaim.
Pale horse(s) may refer to:
The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans is a 1925 book by Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican cartoonist. It is a collection of 66 black-and-white caricatures of famous American personalities from the 1920s. The future Edward VIII, alluded to in the title, appears as the frontispiece at a race track; he had made a widely publicized visit to the United States in 1924. Many of the drawings were originally published in Vanity Fair magazine, which employed Covarrubias as a staff cartoonist.
SS Statendam was an ocean liner of the Holland America Line built in 1957. She was bought by the Paquet group in 1982 and renamed Rhapsody and sold again to the Lelakis group in 1986. Later she became part of the Regency Cruises fleet and was named Regent Star in the Regency fleet. She was laid up after the Regency Cruises bankruptcy and remained in poor condition for many years. She was scrapped in Alang, India in 2004.
Doug Dorst is an American novelist, short story writer, and creative writing instructor. Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos.
Marcella Comès Winslow was an American photographer and portrait painter. She was the official portrait painter of the United States Poet Laureate.
The Old Order: Stories of the South is a collection of nine works of short fiction and a short novel by Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1955 by Harvest Books, a paperback subsidiary of Harcourt, Brace and Company. The works selected for this volume are assembled from Porter's previously published material.
The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter is a book by Katherine Anne Porter published by Delacorte Press in 1970. The anthology includes critical, personal, and biographical essays; three sections of an unfinished work about Cotton Mather; book reviews; letters; and poems.
Baroness Marie Rose Antoinette Catherine de Robert d'Aqueria de Rochegude d'Erlanger (1874–1959) was a patron of the arts, supporting artists such as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Cecil Beaton, Romaine Brooks, Philip de László and Sergei Diaghilev. She was known as "The Flame" for her hair color. She was widely known as Kate d'Erlanger.
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories is a collection of nine works of short fiction by Katherine Anne Porter, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1944. The stories also appear in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965).
Flowering Judas and Other Stories is a collection of ten works of short fiction by Katherine Anne Porter, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1935. The volume is an amalgamation of four previously uncollected works and the six stories comprising Porter's first collection, Flowering Judas (1930), also published by Harcourt and Brace. All of these stories appear in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965).
"Holiday" is a short story by Katherine Anne Porter which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1960. The work is included in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). The story received the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1962.
"María Concepción" is a work of short fiction by Katherine Anne Porter first published in The Century Magazine in 1922. The story was collected in The Flowering Judas (1930) and later in Flowering Judas and Other Stories in 1935, each published by Harcourt, Brace and Company. "Maria Concepción" is included with other previously published works in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965).
Cyrilly Abels was an American editor and literary agent.
