Book of the Month: Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (1939) Critical Evaluation "The three short novels that make up Pale Horse, Pale Rider -- Old Mortality, Noon Wine, and the title story itself -- ask in turn the three questions that, as the critic Mark Schorer put it, humankind has always asked: What were we? What are we? What will we be? Old Morality addresses the first of these: It is a coming-of-age story about the self-deceptions that can turn a family's history into both romance and burden. Noon Wine shows how the easygoing past can be transformed in an instant into a terrible [...]

Critical Assessment "The three short novels that make up Pale Horse, Pale Rider — Old Mortality, Noon Wine, and the title story itself — ask in turn the three questions that, as the critic Mark Schorer put it, humankind has always asked: What were we? What are we? What will we be? . . . "But it is where we find ourselves in this century that makes the title story of Porter's collection one that must be read. . . . "It is 1918, in the midst of both World War I and the influenza epidemic, a concurrence that one character [...]