The fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, despite the wide-spread critical adulation, has never found the public which its distinction merits. Many of her stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction, and some are not often equalled. She belongs to the relatively small group of writers—extraordinarily small, when one considers the vast number of stories published every year in English and American magazines—who have done serious, consistent, original, and vital work in the form of short fiction—the group which would include James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Kay Boyle, for example. This list does not pretend to be exhaustive, and does not include a considerable number of other writers who, though often finding other forms more congenial, the novel or poetry, have scored occasional triumphs in the field of short fiction—such writers as William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, John Bishop (I refer to his story, ‘If Only”), Caroline Gordon, Delmore Schwartz, Conrad Aiken, Yvor Winters. This list could be quite long. Then, of course, there is a very large group of writers who have a great facility, a great mechanical competence, and sometimes moments of real perception, but who work from no fundamental and central conviction. Their work feeds the hungry presses from which drop out the magazines.
It was once fashionable to argue complacently that the popular magazine had created the short-story — had provided the market and had cultivated an appetite for the product. But at the same time, and progressively, the magazine has corrupted the short story. For instance, a story by William Faulkner in Collier’s is a cruel parody of his serious work. What the magazine encourages is not so much the short story as a conscious or unconscious division of the artistic self of the writer. Now one can still discover (as in an address delivered last year by Mr. Frederick Lewis Allen to the American Philosophical Society) a genial self-congratulation in the face of “mass appreciation.” But, writes Mr. R. P. Blackmur in reply:
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