Katherine Anne Porter: Kyle's Pulitzer Prize Winner

The modest frame house in Kyle, just south of Austin, is where one of American literature's most celebrated voices spent her earliest years. Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek in eighteen ninety, but after her mother's death in eighteen ninety-two, her grandmother brought the four surviving children to this home in Kyle and raised them here.

She left Texas as a young woman, but the landscapes and people of Central Texas never left her. Her collected short fiction won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in nineteen sixty-six. Her novel Ship of Fools, which drew on a voyage to Europe in nineteen thirty-one and took her many years to write, became the best-selling novel in the United States in nineteen sixty-two. The city of Kyle purchased the old homestead in nineteen ninety-seven and began restoring it. It sits quietly along the main road, a small house that produced an enormous writer.