Katherine Anne Porter

Raised largely by her grandmother in rural Texas after her mother's early death, Porter reinvented herself repeatedly (journalist, occasional actress, several early marriages she rarely discussed) before nearly dying of Spanish influenza in Denver in 1918, an ordeal so severe her hair reportedly turned white overnight. That brush with death became Pale Horse, Pale Rider two decades later.

She spent years in postrevolutionary Mexico among its muralists and radicals, material that fed her stories, and worked for two decades on Ship of Fools, her only full-length novel, before it finally appeared in 1962 to enormous commercial success.

Her Collected Stories won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1966; she died in 1980 at ninety.