Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Encyclopedia
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (ISBN 0-15-170755-3) is a collection of three short novels by American author Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...

 published in 1939.

While these three short novels "Old Mortality," "Noon Wine
Noon Wine
Noon Wine is a 1937 short novel written by American author Katherine Anne Porter. It was published in 1939 as part of Pale Horse, Pale Rider , a collection of three short novels by the author, including the title story and "Old Mortality." A dark tragedy about a farmer's futile act of homicide that...

" and the eponymous "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," have been described as novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

s, Ms Porter referred to them as short novels. Ms Porter, in the preface "Go Little Book . . " to "The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter," abjured the word "novella," calling it a "slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything." She went on to say "Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels."

The title story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is about the relationship between a newspaper woman, Miranda, and a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918
Spanish flu
The 1918 flu pandemic was an influenza pandemic, and the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus . It was an unusually severe and deadly pandemic that spread across the world. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the geographic origin...

. In the course of the narrative, Miranda becomes sick and delirious, but recovers, only to find that Adam has died of the disease, which he likely caught while tending to her. The story is set in Denver, Colorado
Denver, Colorado
The City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...

. Porter herself lived for a time in Denver, where she wrote reviews for the Rocky Mountain News
Rocky Mountain News
The Rocky Mountain News was a daily newspaper published in Denver, Colorado, United States from April 23, 1859, until February 27, 2009. It was owned by the E. W. Scripps Company from 1926 until its closing. As of March 2006, the Monday-Friday circulation was 255,427...

 and was stricken with the influenza. The historian Alfred Crosby
Alfred Crosby
Alfred W. Crosby is a historian, professor and author of such books as The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism...

 considered Pale Horse, Pale Rider to be such an exceptional depiction of the suffering caused by the influenza that he dedicated his book about the 1918 epidemic to Porter. The author Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...

 said "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" was “at the top level, you know, in that collection of the world’s short novels.” The book also includes the stories "Noon Wine
Noon Wine
Noon Wine is a 1937 short novel written by American author Katherine Anne Porter. It was published in 1939 as part of Pale Horse, Pale Rider , a collection of three short novels by the author, including the title story and "Old Mortality." A dark tragedy about a farmer's futile act of homicide that...

" and "Old Mortality." The title is Biblical, coming from Revelations 6:1-8. There the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were respectively: Conquest on a white horse; War on a red horse; Famine on a black horse; and Death mounted on a pale horse.

Theme

Porter herself said that the title story was about the pale rider death who takes away an entire era, as illustrated in the ironic last line: "Now there would be time for everything."
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