Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) lived a long life which fluctuated between glamour and loneliness. Porter experienced firsthand many of the most iconic events of the twentieth century and wrote about most of them. Growing up on a farm in Texas at the end of the nineteenth century, she was a lifelong advocate of liberal social politics, and worked as a journalist on the American home-front during the First World War; she barely survived the influenza epidemic of 1918; moved to Greenwich village during its heyday as a center of radical politics and bohemian artists; lived in Mexico during and after its failed revolution; was in Europe during the rise of Nazism; and returned to the US during the Cold War and rabid McCarthyism.