ON WRITING "SHIP OF FOOLS." Typed Letter Signed ("Katherine Anne Porter"), 3 pp, 4to, Ridgefield, CT, August 18, 1958, to Mr. Clemons, creases, else excellent, with autograph corrections. Porter writes this lengthy letter to a fellow writer while in the late stages of her novel Ship of Fools, which she had begun in 1940. In part: "I am towards the end of the triple-copy stage with my Ship of Fools, which began as a diary on board ship August 22, 1931, from Vera Cruz Mexico to Bremerhaven Germany. What those passengers have become since would startle them. It even startles me sometimes. It is like everything I do, based on actual events and real persons and just how and where it becomes fiction I simply am unable to say; but it is fiction and nothing else by now, I even based one of the characters very lightly on myself, but she got away long ago - was indeed one of the first to escape. In fact I have now become all of the people in the book, the fat man, in the cherry colored shirt, the captain in the bridge, the drowned man, the hunchback, the Jew, poor obstinate David, all of the women I'm sure, as well as the ship's cat and the sea-sick bulldog, and sometimes I have the oddest illusion that I am the ship, too." The novel was published in 1962, outselling every other American novel published that year. Porter goes on to discuss her writing process, her publisher's anxiousness, and the theater. See illustration.
ON WRITING "SHIP OF FOOLS." Typed Letter Signed ("Katherine Anne Porter"), 3 pp, 4to, Ridgefield, CT, August 18, 1958, to Mr. Clemons, creases, else excellent, with autograph corrections. Porter writes this lengthy letter to a fellow writer while in the late stages of her novel Ship of Fools, which she had begun in 1940. In part: "I am towards the end of the triple-copy stage with my Ship of Fools, which began as a diary on board ship August 22, 1931, from Vera Cruz Mexico to Bremerhaven Germany. What those passengers have become since would startle them. It even startles me sometimes. It is like everything I do, based on actual events and real persons and just how and where it becomes fiction I simply am unable to say; but it is fiction and nothing else by now, I even based one of the characters very lightly on myself, but she got away long ago - was indeed one of the first to escape. In fact I have now become all of the people in the book, the fat man, in the cherry colored shirt, the captain in the bridge, the drowned man, the hunchback, the Jew, poor obstinate David, all of the women I'm sure, as well as the ship's cat and the sea-sick bulldog, and sometimes I have the oddest illusion that I am the ship, too." The novel was published in 1962, outselling every other American novel published that year. Porter goes on to discuss her writing process, her publisher's anxiousness, and the theater. See illustration.
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