In “Granny Weatherall,” Porter creates with remarkable insight the old woman’s passage to last breath. In “Pale Horse,” she records a captivating life-after-death vision a young woman is forced to relinquish as she waves the pale rider on, stoically taking up life again in spite of a near-fatal blow. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Porter personifies and stares Death in the face. Not surprisingly, her stories deal with death over and over again it is death that gives the best of them their emotional edge. Her mother’s death in childbirth when Porter was barely a toddler may have been one of her first memories, and her own life was threatened by tuberculosis and the influenza epidemic of 1918 when she was still a young woman.

It is no mistake to say Death was her familiar, as it must have been for most people born when dying typically occurred, not in the sterilized and remote world of a hospital, but in the next room. Her last breath came and went quietly, but her death had not. There have been no profound-or even simple-last words, no enigmatic questions posed nor secrets betrayed, just a quiet bowing out-a step, step, slide behind the final curtain and out the stage door. This visit has become the last of the many I have made to be with her during the last two years of her life. I am standing at her side holding her hand, looking at the notches on the ticking clock, the time moving on, even as Katherine Anne has moved beyond it. She has expired in the true sense of the word, breathing out the last of her life imperceptibly. Throughout her ordeal, on everyone’s mind is “the war, the war, the WAR to end WAR, war for Democracy, for humanity, a safe world forever and ever”.September 18, 1980-It is not quite 5 p. When Miranda falls ill, Adam cares for her until she is moved to a hospital. She is now working as a drama critic for a newspaper in Denver, where she falls in love with a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Miranda returns in the title story, Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

The three parts of Old Mortality introduce the teenager Miranda and chronicle her journey of self-discovery, as she gradually realizes her family’s romantic nostalgia for her absent uncle and late aunt bears little resemblance to the truth. In Noon Wine? a family struggling to live on a farm in Texas is saved by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious stranger - only to have their world upended again by the arrival, nine years later, of a second stranger.

The classic 1939 collection of three novellas by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author and journalist, including the famous title story set during the influenza epidemic of 1918

Porter pale horse pale rider