Porter married diplomat Eugene Pressly in New York; the couple later lived in France and Switzerland before divorcing.
On September 15, 1925, Katherine Anne Porter married Eugene Pressly, a young United States diplomat, in New York City. This marriage would take Porter abroad for extended periods, as Pressly's diplomatic postings brought the couple to live in France and Switzerland during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Porter's years living in Europe with Pressly proved artistically fruitful, exposing her to European literary and artistic circles and providing the backdrop for some of her most significant later work, including material that would eventually inform her novel Ship of Fools, which drew on a 1931 transatlantic voyage she took from Mexico to Germany.
Despite the intellectual and geographic richness this marriage afforded her, the relationship with Pressly ultimately did not last, ending in divorce. It was one of four marriages in Porter's life, each contributing in different ways to the emotional and experiential material she drew upon in her fiction. Her time in Europe during this marriage placed her among the expatriate literary generation of the interwar period, alongside other American writers living abroad.