1966 -- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

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To part is to die a little, it is said (in every language that I can read), but my farewell to these stories is a happy one, a renewal of their life, a prolonging of their time under the sun, which is what any artist most longs for—to be read, and remembered.
Go little book….

—the closing lines of Katherine Anne Porter’s Introduction to her Collected Stories

Katherine Anne Porter’s biographers do not portray an unambitious woman at peace with her accomplishment. Several weeks after she failed to win the 1963 National Book Award for Ship of Fools, Porter wrote to her nephew from Italy to say that, though her publisher was “ecstatic with rage,” she had predicted as much, and more:

I am now trying to explain to S. why I am not going to be given any more awards, grants, prizes in that country, probably in my whole life: Too many people who have resented me for years are getting into the act. And I myself think I have had my share of love and praise and fine criticism, and must expect a reaction, especially when I hit a million-dollar jackpot, as I have: the kind of people who hate my writing, and my reputation, are joined by the people who hate my having that money—it makes quite a mob. I find it exhilarating, probably because I know that no thing, nobody can harm me, or take away what I have. Her Collected Stories received not only the 1966 NBA but the Pulitzer, and that year she was also admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.