Pressly, Eugene, 1904-1979

Katherine Anne Porter:

Katherine Anne Porter was born May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas, to Harrison Boone and Mary Alice Jones Porter. As a girl Porter received a traditional, albeit incomplete, formal education. In the course of her lifetime she became a voracious reader, and eventually traveled extensively in the United States and abroad. Porter's private life included a series of failed marriages, and was punctuated by affairs of a platonic and erotic nature. A consistent conflict in Porter's life revolved around the requirements of her art and the demands of daily life. It wasn't until later in her career that Porter established what were for her the ideal conditions for the production of literary work.

From an early age Porter envisioned herself as a writer. Much of her fiction is based on her own experiences, and many of her fictional characters are based on the people she knew. Although relatively modest in terms of volume, critics of Porter's work have consistently remarked on its uniformly high quality. Porter's literary art aims at what might be characterized as an "essentialist" rendering of life and character. In her fiction, Porter seeks to uncover the fundamental singularities of circumstance and personality which produce the texture and drama of lived experience.

With the appearance of María Concepción in the December 1922 issue of Century Magazine, Porter published the first story that is considered part of her canon. Her fiction from the 1920s was collected in a volume titled Flowering Judas, published in 1930 in a run of 600 copies. Her second collection of stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, appeared in 1935. Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels, was published in 1939, and collected together three works that had originally appeared in the years 1936-1938. Porter became one of America's leading writers, perhaps best known for her novel Ship of Fools (1962). In 1966 she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porte r. Katherine Anne Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland, on September 18, 1980.

Eugene Pressly:

Eugene Dove Pressly was born in Clarendon, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 1904, to Elizabeth Dove and Ralph McDermott Pressly. (Elizabeth Pressly eventually remarried Karl Merchant). He was the oldest of three children, including brother Hearst Smith Pressly (b. 1907) and sister Suzanne (married name Collins, b. 1909). Eugene Pressly was Katherine Anne Porter's second or third husband (married March 18, 1933, divorced April 9, 1938). He never remarried after their divorce.

Pressly attended Dubois High School in Dubois, Pennsylvania, before going on to do undergraduate coursework in liberal arts studies at Denver University from 1924-1926. From 1928-1929 he attended the University of Mexico, where he studied Spanish in addition to Mexican literature and history. He received no advanced academic degrees. In the course of his career and extensive travels, Pressly eventually attained fluency in Spanish and French and a basic knowledge of German and Russian.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Pressly worked at a series of clerk-stenographer jobs throughout the United States and Mexico. From 1928-1931 he was employed in Mexico as a stenographer and translator for the Institute of Current World Affairs and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Pressly temporarily clerked at the American Embassy in Madrid from 1931-1932, where he also did social and economic research. From May 1932 through September 1936 he worked in the Foreign Service, clerking in Switzerland for the Department of State in postings at Basel (the Consulate) and Geneva (Prepatory and Monetary Conference) and also at Paris, France. In Paris he was employed as a confidential clerk-stenographer and translator in his capacity as a Treasury Department liaison.

After a brief stint as a Spanish-English stenographer for an oil concern in Venezuela, Pressly returned to the Foreign Service. From 1937-1941 he was again posted as a State Department employee, initially in Moscow during the height of the Stalinist terror, but leaving at the outbreak of German-Russian hostilities to clerk at the Nine-Powers Conference in Brussels, Belgium. He later returned to Moscow to work as a confidential translator-stenographer for the American Ambassador.

Pressly was inducted into the United States army in July 1942. Until his honorable discharge in October 1945, he was assigned foreign language duties with a mobile radio unit of psychological warfare. During this period he worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Oran, North Africa, and later with the liaison office of Seventh Army headquarters in southern France and the Rhineland. For his military services, Sergeant Pressly was awarded the Good Conduct Medal and the European African Middle Eastern Service Medal.

From 1947-1948 Pressly worked in Japan on an obscure "employment agreement" entailing the American military occupation there. He also rejoined the Foreign Service, clerking in the Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico. There, he handled confidential files and worked in the "preparation of material having to do with the reporting of the political section of the Embassy." These were to be Pressly’s last important government positions.

Pressly's career in the 1950s and 1960s centered in and around Denver, Colorado. He continued to work as a clerk-stenographer in various civilian positions and eventually took employment as a hotel clerk in Denver. He became increasingly isolated from his family at this time, and his life took a further downturn after he suffered a severe beating in a robbery attempt in 1966. Eugene Dove Pressly died in Denver, Colorado, on May 31, 1979, a little over a year before the death of his former wife, Katherine Anne Porter.

From the guide to the Katherine Anne Porter & Eugene Dove Pressly Papers, 1924-1962, (Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections)