Noon Wine is a 1937 short novel by American author Katherine Anne Porter. It initially appeared in a limited numbered edition of 250, all signed by the author and published by Shuman's.[1] It later appeared in 1939 as part of Pale Horse, Pale Rider (ISBN 0-15-170755-3), 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 leads to his own suicide, the story takes place on a small dairy farm in southern Texas during the 1890s. It has been filmed twice for television, in 1966 and 1985.
While Noon Wine and its companion pieces, "Old Mortality" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," have been described as novellas, Porter referred to them as short novels. 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."