Pale Horse, Pale Rider

 Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter is a novella of stunning beauty and pathos. My edition actually contains three books: the title story and two others: "Old Mortality" and "Noon Wine." Porter is a brilliant writer, and each story is well composed and illuminating. They feel incomplete, though. Each novella is part of a larger family saga, in Texas, at the turn of the century. Porter's alter-ego, Miranda, is either explicitly or thematically present in each novella. Taken together, they invite further reading of her frontier short stories. 

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is the strongest in a strong collection. In this story, Miranda navigates the home front at the end of the First World War, including the 1918 Great Influenza. Porter expertly charts Miranda's disillusionment with patriotism, young love, and harrowing illness. The Miranda character easily anticipates Esther Greenwood in the The Bell Jar or any of Joan Didion's cynical, fashionable protagonists. Given the depth of the character and the strength of the writing, I'd put "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" next to anything by Fitzgerald or Hemingway as essential to understanding American Modernism.