Katherine Anne Porter, Old Mortality

Darlene Harbour Unrue (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1937

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novella

Resources

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In the fall of 1927 and the early winter of 1928, when Katherine Anne Porter was living in Salem, Massachusetts, researching the genealogical history of the Mather family for a biography of Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan leader whose biography she had signed a contract to write, she was inspired to look into her own ancestral history as a first step toward writing an autobiographical novel she tentatively called “Many Redeemers”. The novel was to have three parts: “Legends of the Ancestors”, “Midway of this Mortal Life”, and “The Present Day”. This particular long novel never came to fruition, but parts of it peeled off as smaller works. From “Legends of the Ancestors”

The Old Order

and

Noon Wine

evolved as short novels, and “The Present Day” fed…

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1050 words

Citation: Unrue, Darlene Harbour. "Old Mortality". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14942, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Katherine Anne Porter, Old Mortality

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