Porter married Harcourt, Brace editor Albert Erskine in Greenwich, Connecticut; they divorced in 1942.
On July 31, 1937, Katherine Anne Porter married Albert Erskine, an editor at her publishing house, Harcourt, Brace, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Erskine was notably younger than Porter, and their marriage was closely watched within literary circles given his professional connection to her publisher.
The marriage was troubled from early on and ended in divorce in 1942, making it the shortest-lived of Porter's four marriages in terms of the emotional distance that quickly developed between the couple, even though it lasted several years. Erskine would go on to have a distinguished career in publishing, later becoming a prominent editor associated with authors such as William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry at Random House.
This period of Porter's life, despite its personal turbulence, coincided with continued productivity in her writing career, as she worked on the stories that would eventually comprise Pale Horse, Pale Rider, published just two years after her divorce from Erskine. The marriage is documented as part of the complex personal history that ran alongside — and sometimes intersected with — Porter's professional literary life.