Katherine Anne Porter: Rebirth in Denver
After leaving the home of a writer who spent the whole of his life in Denver, you're
headed to the home of a another who spent all of one year here but was changed
profoundly by the experience.
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) - known today, largely, as the author of A Ship
of Fools - was a 28-year-old Texan in the summer of 1918 who was desperately trying
to restart her life after spending nearly a decade in a stultifying marriage. For
women at the time, the word "divorcee" was a reputation-killing epithet that
sometimes required relocation for survival, and Porter - as an independence-inclined
woman who admitted that she needed to "bolt" periodically - chose Denver as the
place to bolt to and begin again.
Resourceful enough to land a job at the Rocky Mountain News with only minimal
journalistic experience, Porter moved into a rooming house at 1510 York Street, just
steps from East Colfax Avenue. The building still stands, now housing the
Colorado Free University
behind a beautiful stone entryway topped by two watchful eagles
who once watched over Porter.
While she started with "style" pieces (typically assigned to women at the time),
Porter moved to drama criticism and was quickly promoted to drama editor. Years
later, Porter would remark that, "Like many romantic young women who 'want to
write,' I was a victim to the idea that a newspaper job was the place to learn
one's craft. It isn't so, of course, and it only took me about eight months to
discover this fact of life."
The event that made 1918 a horrible, unforgettable year for Americans quickly
swept Porter up as well. She caught Spanish Influenza amid an epidemic that
would kill over 300,000 people in the U. S. that year. She couldn't immediately
be admitted to the hospital - there was no room - and her landlady threatened to
evict her because of the risk of contagion.
While she suffered in her room on York Street, another boarder - a young man
never identified by Porter or her subsequent biographers - came to her assistance,
nursed her until a hospital bed became available, then caught the flu himself and
died from it. The exact nature of the relationship is unclear even today: was
it a love affair or an intense friendship borne of an extraordinary emergency?
Either way, Porter's well-known novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider commemorates the
events of that year, with Porter as Miranda and the mystery man as Adam.
Finally admitted to the hospital, Porter's condition was so serious that her
colleagues at the News prepared an obituary for publication; in Texas, her father
chose a burial plot for his daughter. Desperate, doctors tried administering
strychnine - experimental at the time - and in short order it saved her life.
Porter would say later that, "It just simply divided my life, cut across it like
that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was
in some strange way altered."
DENVER'S LITERARY LANDMARKS DRIVING TOUR