Deadlines!
Katherine Anne Porter was notorious for missing deadlines due to her exacting writing style. She could spend months or years working a single piece, mulling over a story during the “brooding period” of her writing process. She would meticulously plan the dialogue and story arc in her head before eventually putting the story on paper. Porter wanted to make as few changes as possible to the first draft and wouldn’t allow publishers to make changes either. If the story wasn’t perfect in her opinion, then it would be relegated to her in-progress pile, perhaps indefinitely.
One of Porter’s most recognized works, Flowering Judas, took 20 years to complete. She also worked on a never completed biography of puritan clergyman Cotton Mather for 40 years and with four different publishers. Granted, she wrote plenty of other pieces during these time frames, but Porter much preferred to write as the urge came to her and not to force a story to completion.
Porter addressed her deadlines in an interview saying, “It is nobody’s business but mine how long it takes me to do a piece of work. The work is my work, not theirs. It has nothing to do with them until its produced. So therefore I don’t pay much attention to that.”





You can explore digitized letters by Katherine Anne Porter’s online in the online exhibit Katherine Anne Porter: Correspondence from the Archives, 1912-1977.
Digitized photographs of Katherine Anne Porter can be found in our Digital Collections repository.
Browse the finding aid to the Katherine Anne Porter papers and contact us to learn more!
Mattie Lewis is a student in the Masters of Library and Information Sciences program and Graduate Assistant with the Katherine Anne Porter Collection at UMD.