The Leaning Tower and Other Stories is a collection of nine works of short fiction by Katherine Anne Porter, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1944.

Diana Trilling in The Nation declared that the volume surpassed Porter's earlier short fiction collections.

[6] Theodore Spencer of The Sewanee Review wrote: “Miss Porter’s Leaning Tower, following her other works of short fiction, has placed her at the top level of contemporary American fiction.”[7] Orville Prescott in The New York Times considered some of the stories “almost masterpieces”, adding that the volume “is not so impressive as the two earlier volumes [Flowering Judas and other Stories (1935), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)]...Exquisite as these stories are, they all are so slight, so inconclusive, so insubstantial [that] they are strangely unsatisfactory.”[8] Edward A.

Somewhere behind Miss Porter’s stories there is a conception of a natural human spirit in terms of their bearing on which all the other forces of society are appraised.” —Literary critic Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker, September 23, 1944[11][12] Whereas Porter introduced the character Miranda in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” as a young woman, in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, Porter resumes her examination of the child Miranda she had developed in “Old Mortality.” Literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote: Perhaps the most interesting section of Katherine Anne Porter’s work is composed of her stories about women—particularly her heroine Miranda, who figures in two of the three novelettes that make up her previous volume, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” The first six stories of “The Leaning Tower” deal with Miranda’s childhood and her family background of Louisianians living in southern Texas.

This is the setting in which Miss Porter is most at home, and one finds in it the origins of that spirit of which the starvation and violation elsewhere make the subjects of her other stories.