The 22nd stamp in the Literary Arts series honored acclaimed writer Katherine Anne Porter. Although skilled in the creation of short fiction, Porter did not achieve significant financial success until the publication of her only full-length novel, Ship of Fools (1962).
A best seller that was eventually made into a movie, Ship of Fools drew on a log Porter kept of the sea voyage she made from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, in 1931.
Award-winning stamp artist Michael J. Deas based his painting of Porter on a 1936 photograph made by George Platt Lynes. By including a ship in the design, Deas links Porter’s portrait to the sea voyage that inspired her best-selling novel Ship of Fools and to her assessment of life, which she called, “this brave voyage.”
Considered a master prose stylist, Porter won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1966 for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, which was published in 1965.
