This is J. Bradley Minnick with Facts About Fiction.
“I sometimes think I had an extraordinarily painful sort of life because I had so many shocking kinds of experiences. Just psychological you know and that sort of thing. And, I now think everyone of them were exactly what I needed. I really do. I believe they were good for me because I had a tendency to think I could do anything. I would try anything.”
-Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter, author Flowering Judas and Other Stories, The Ship of Fools, and The Never-Ending Wrong, came from a family of storytellers, including her father’s second cousin William O. Henry.
Always restless, at 21 Porter ran away from her marriage and eventually landed in Chicago.
Here are the facts:
In 1911, Porter took a newspaper job and was sent to the Old S. and A., a movie studio, to do a story. Porter got in the wrong line and suddenly found herself acting in a courtroom scene. Because the pay was considerably better, Porter stayed on for a week.
When she returned to her newspaper job, she was paid 18 dollars for her “week’s non-work” and promptly fired.