BiographyCallie Russell Porter, the fourth of five children, was born on May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas. After her mother, Mary Alice (Jones) Porter, died of tuberculosis or bronchitis when Porter was two years old, her father, Harrison Boone, took her and her siblings to their grandmother's house in Kyle, Texas. Porter was enrolled in public and private schools until she was 15. One of the schools he attended was called Thomas School, a private Methodist school located in San Antonio, Texas, for one year in 1904 where he had his only formal education after grammar. school. Porter's grandmother, Catherine Porter, was a great storyteller who provided her with an early appreciation for fiction. When Porter was 16, she married a man named John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy Texas rancher, in 1906. He was physically abusive. and even threw her down the stairs while drunk, leaving Porter with a broken ankle. They later divorced in 1915 and legally changed her name to Katherine Anne Porter, influenced by her grandmother, as part of her divorce decree from Koontz. Porter remarried several times. In 1926, she married Ernest Stock and lived briefly in Connecticut before divorcing Stock in 1927. Then, in 1933, Porter married Eugene Dove Pressly and divorced him in 1938. That same year, she married again to a man named Albert Erskine Jr. and divorced. him in 1942. Later in 1915, Porter contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for two years in the Carlsbad sanatorium in San Antonio, Texas. There, she decided to become a professional writer and journalist instead of an actress. To achieve his goals, Porter “practiced his writing in every way” (Peacock 188) that he could. He then began to work as a diary… in the middle of paper… olence,” and died (The Martyr 37). The theme of “The Martyr” is the appearance of death. Rubén turns to food to cope with his depression instead of continuing with his artwork or finding something else less destructive to distract him from Isabel. Because he consumes an unhealthy amount of food to cope with his depression, he ends up dying. Some of the literary elements that can be found in Porter's stories, such as "Theft" and "The Martyr", are characterization, conflict, and theme. . The women in Porter's stories reflected what life was realistically like in the nineteenth century. It was difficult for women to be independent because men always did things for them and didn't listen to what they had to say. Almost all women wanted their independence, but their fate was most likely determined by the controlling actions of men who sought to make women into what they wanted..