Pale Horse, Pale Rider comprises three of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's short novels or long stories, as Porter--who didn't hold with the term "novella"--called her pieces. In the masterly "Noon Wine," set on a Texas farm circa 1900, she offers an unforgettable study of evil. According to Reynolds Price the tale "can stand shoulder to shoulder with anything in Tolstoy or Chekhov." Both "Old Mortality" and the title story center on Porter's fictional counterpart, Miranda: a resilient Southern heroine who, as Mary Gordon observed, is in "the precarious position of a woman who must earn her way with no one behind her to break her fall."
  "Many of Katherine Anne Porter's stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction," said Robert Penn Warren. "Miss Porter has the power that Chekhov or Frost or Ibsen, or sometimes Pound, has, the power to make the common thing glow with an Eden-like innocence." And The Saturday Review stated, "Porter moves in the illustrious company headed by Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry James."