eXpatriate!
Katherine Anne Porter lived and worked all over the world. Porter lived ten years of her life outside of the United States. A total of three of those years were spent in Mexico. Between 1920 and 1931, she made four trips to Mexico establishing long residences in Mexico City between November 1920 and September 1921 and between May 1930 and August 1931. There, she became an editor of the English section of El Heraldo de Mexico and made friends with Diego Rivera and other revolutionaries. This proved to be a pivotal time for Porter as it inspired several of Porter's stories including Flowering Judas.
In 1931, Porter received a Guggenheim fellowship which she used to travel to Europe. She went to Berlin, Paris, and Madrid before moving to Basil, Switzerland. Porter lives in four foreign countries and at least five U.S. states for extended periods during the 1930s. She lives in Mexico from April 1930- August 1931. She then travels to Berlin, Germany, where she lives for four months in 1931-1932. She resides predominantly in Paris, France, between 1932 and 1936 but also lives in Switzerland for six months in 1932. It is in Paris where Porter married her 4th husband Eugene Pressly, who worked for the U.S. foreign service. In early 1936, Porter makes an extended four-month visit to the U.S. after which she and Pressly repatriate in October 1936.
Porter would continue to travel for work, visiting Brussels, Moscow, Rome, London, Nice, and more. Occasionally she would travel to make audio recordings of her stories, but most of her trips happened as part of a culture exchange tours facilitated by the U.S. Department of State. In 1952, she was based in Brittany and Paris before, during, and after her participation in the International Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris in May 1952. She was also Fulbright recipient in Liege, Belgium. She spent five months of 1963 in Paris during her European sojourn after the April 1962 publication of Ship of Fools.
You can explore digitized letters by Katherine Anne Porter's online in the online exhibit Katherine Anne Porter: Correspondence from the Archives, 1912-1977.
Browse the finding aid to the Katherine Anne Porter papers to learn more about Porter's hobbies and manuscripts!
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.
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