Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) was born Callie Porter in Indian Creek, Texas. Her mother died when she was about two, and her father moved the family to live with his mother, who raised them in a house that Porter recalled as "full of books" and extreme poverty. When Porter was eleven her grandmother died; when she was sixteen, she married so she could leave home. It was a short union, and by 1916 she began her writing career as a reporter. She worked for newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, and Denver, Colorado.

Porter moved to Greenwich Village in New York City in 1918 and then spent the years between 1918 and 1924 living mainly in Mexico, freelancing and becoming involved in revolutionary politics. "Maria Conception," her first fiction story, was written while she was in Mexico. Published in Century magazine in 1922, it won her critical acclaim.

Porter lived a life filled with travel, activity, many jobs, and four marriages. She was a self-supporting woman with expensive tastes, so even though she considered herself a "serious writer," she didn't want to give up lucrative freelance offers, which had the effect of limiting her literary production. In 1931, Porter used a Guggenheim Fellowship to return to Mexico for several years. In the 1950s she lectured and was a writer-in-residence at college campuses. Collected Stories (1965) received a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Gold Medal for fiction of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Among her other works are Flowering Judas (1929), Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944), and her only novel, Ship of Fools, begun in 1931, but not published until 1962. Ship of Fools was made into a film and brought her a great deal of money.