Kay Boyle was born on February 19, 1902, and died on December 27, 1992. She was an American writer, teacher, and activist. Her stories often showed how personal lives connected to bigger political issues. Her work helped shape modernist literature, a new style of writing in the early 20th century. She was part of a group of writers living in Paris during the 1920s. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won an O. Henry Award.

Early years

Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities, mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio. She had one sibling, an older sister named Joan (1900–1993), who later became Mrs. Detweiler. Her father, Howard Peterson Boyle, was a lawyer, and her mother, Katherine (Evans) Boyle, was a literary and social activist who believed wealthy people should help those with less money. In later years, Kay Boyle supported efforts to end racial discrimination and protect civil rights. She also worked to stop the use of nuclear weapons and encouraged the United States to leave the Vietnam War.

Boyle attended the private Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and later studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati. She was interested in the arts and took violin lessons at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. In 1922, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a writer and editor for a small magazine.

Marriages and family life

In 1923, she married a French exchange student named Richard Brault and moved to France. She stayed in Europe for most of the next twenty years. After separating from her husband, she began a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh. They had a daughter named Sharon in March 1927, just five months after Walsh passed away from tuberculosis in October 1926.

In 1928, she met Laurence Vail, who was married to Peggy Guggenheim at the time. Boyle and Vail lived together from 1929 to 1932, and after both divorced their previous spouses, they married. With Vail, she had three more children: Apple-Joan in 1929, Kathe in 1934, and Clover in 1939. During her time in France, Boyle worked with several creative literary magazines and became friends with many writers and artists in Paris, especially those near Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby, who owned Black Sun Press and published her first collection of short stories. In 1928, Harry Crosby used money from stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. Other friends included Eugene and Maria Jolas. Boyle also wrote for transition, a well-known literary magazine of that time. She was both a poet and a novelist, and her early works often explored themes of love and relationships between men and women. Her short stories won two O. Henry Awards.

In 1936, she wrote a novel titled Death of a Man, which criticized the rise of Nazism. In 1943, after divorcing Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein. They had two children: Faith in 1942 and Ian in 1943. After living in France, Austria, England, and Germany following World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.

McCarthyism, later life

In the United States, Boyle and her husband faced challenges due to McCarthyism in the 1950s. Her husband was removed from his job in the Public Affairs Division of the United States Department of State by Roy Cohn. Boyle lost her role as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a position she had held for six years. Most major magazines prevented her from working during this time. Her life and writing became more focused on political issues during this period.

In 1957, the United States Department of State cleared Boyle and her husband of any wrongdoing.

In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls’ school. He was hired again by the State Department and sent to Iran, but he died there in 1963.

In 1962, Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer’s Conference at Wagner College. In 1963, she began working as a creative writing teacher at San Francisco State College, where she stayed until 1979.

During this time, Boyle became deeply involved in political activism. In 1966, she traveled to Cambodia as part of a group called "Americans Want to Know" to gather information. She joined protests and was arrested twice in 1967 and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, promising not to pay taxes in protest of the Vietnam War. Later, she supported Amnesty International and the NAACP. After retiring from San Francisco State College, Boyle held short-term writer-in-residence positions at Eastern Washington University and the University of Oregon.

Boyle was one of the people who signed an agreement to organize a meeting to create a world constitution. This led to the first-ever World Constituent Assembly, which worked to write and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Boyle passed away at a retirement community in Mill Valley, California, on December 27, 1992.

Legacy

Kay Boyle wrote more than 40 books during her lifetime, including 14 novels, eight poetry collections, 11 short story collections, three children's books, and translations and essays from French to English. Most of her papers and manuscripts are stored at the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The library holds two special collections of Kay Boyle's letters: the Ruby Cohn Collection and the Alice L. Kahler Collection. A detailed study of Boyle's life and work was published in 1986 in a book titled Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist by Sandra Whipple Spanier. In 1994, Joan Mellen wrote a thorough biography of Kay Boyle titled Kay Boyle: Author of Herself.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Boyle received two O. Henry Awards, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1980, she was honored with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for her "extraordinary contribution to American literature over a lifetime of creative work."