Ship of Fools (Porter novel)
First edition
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| Author | Katherine Anne Porter |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Little, Brown |
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Publication date
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1962 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Ship of Fools is a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter, telling the tale of a group of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German passenger ship. The large cast of characters includes Germans, a Swiss family, Mexicans, Americans, Spaniards, a group of Cuban medical students, and a Swede. In steerage, there are 876 Spanish workers being returned from Cuba. It is an allegory tracing the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity".
Porter had been widely praised for her short stories, mostly written between 1922 and 1940. She began work on the novel in 1940, intending it initially to be a novella (or "short novel", as Porter would put it, as she famously wrote about how she detested the word "novella"). The story was based on a journal she kept in 1931 during a sea voyage from Veracruz, Mexico, on her way to study in Bremerhaven, Germany, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the characters in the novel were based on real people she met during the trip. The title was taken from Das Narrenschiff ("The Fool-Ship"), a 15th-century German poem by Sebastian Brant.
For many years, the initial publisher Harcourt Brace would announce the forthcoming novel, but she remained unable to complete it for 22 years. As a result, it became eagerly expected by the literary world. In response to critics who complained about the long wait, Porter said, "Look here, this is my life and my work and you keep out of it. When I have a book I will be glad to have it published."
Ship of Fools outsold every other American novel published in 1962. It was a Book of the Month Club selection and immediately, the film rights were sold for $500,000 ($3,958,746 adjusted for inflation).
Critical reception was mixed. While Mark Schorer of The New York Times and Glenway Wescott in The Atlantic Monthly were effusive in their praise, Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic and Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review were disappointed. Porter herself was never satisfied with the novel, calling it "unwieldy" and "enormous".
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