"The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter" won the 1966 National Book Award for Fiction, honoring it as the year's outstanding American fiction.
On March 16, 1966, Katherine Anne Porter was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. The National Book Award, established in 1950, is among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States, recognizing the year's most outstanding work of fiction published by an American author.
This award recognized not just the individual volume but effectively celebrated Porter's entire career as a short story writer, since the collection gathered together decades of her finest work spanning from the 1920s through the 1940s. The recognition came at the height of Porter's public visibility, following the massive commercial success of her novel Ship of Fools just a few years earlier, which had introduced her work to a much broader popular readership.
Winning the National Book Award placed Porter among an elite group of celebrated American authors and represented a pinnacle in a career that had been built on relatively few but critically exceptional publications. Just weeks later, the same collection would also win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making 1966 an extraordinary year of recognition for Porter, capping nearly half a century of literary work with the two most significant fiction prizes in American letters.