Kay Boyle

 ( 1902 Births ) 

Boyle was educated at the exclusive Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati. Interested in the arts, she studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before settling in New York City in 1922 where she found work as a writer/editor with a small magazine.

In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail lived together between 1929 until 1932 when, following their divorces, they married. With Vail, she had three more children - daughters Apple-Joan in 1929, Kathe in 1934, and Clover in 1939. During her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry Crosby and Caresse Crosby who owned the Black Sun Press and published her first work of fiction, a collection titled Short Stories. They became such good friends that in 1928 Harry Crosby cashed in some stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. Other friends included Eugene Jolas and Maria Jolas. Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day. A poet as well as a novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power relationships between men and women. Boyle's short stories won two O. Henry Awards.

In 1936, she wrote a novel, Death of a Man, an attack on the growing threat of Nazism. In 1943, following her divorce from Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein, with whom she had two children - Faith in 1942 and Ian in 1943. After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.

She and her husband were cleared by the United States Department of State in 1957.

In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls' school. He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.

Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College in 1962. In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the "Americans Want to Know" fact-seeking mission. She participated in protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Writers and Editors War Tax Protest page 2. In her later years, she became an active supporter of Amnesty International and worked for the NAACP. After retiring from San Francisco State College, Boyle briefly held writer-in-residence positions, including at Eastern Washington University in Cheney and the University of Oregon in Eugene.

She was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

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

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

• Process (written in 1925, published by University of Illinois Press in 2001)
• Plagued by the Nightingale (Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931)
• Year Before Last (Harrison Smith, 1932)
• Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933)
• My Next Bride (Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1934)
• Death of a Man (Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1936)
• Yellow Dusk by Bettina Bedwell (ghostwritten by Kay Boyle) (1937)
• Monday Night (Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1938)
• The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels (Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1940). Includes The Crazy Hunter, The Bridegroom's Body, and Big Fiddle.
• Primer for Combat (Simon and Schuster, 1942)
• Avalanche (Simon and Schuster, 1944)
• A Frenchman Must Die (Simon and Schuster, 1946)
• 1939 (Simon and Schuster, 1948)
• His Human Majesty (McGraw-Hill, 1949)
• The Seagull on the Step (Knopf, 1955)
• Three Short Novels (Beacon Press, 1958). Includes The Crazy Hunter, The Bridegroom's Body, and Decision.
• Generation Without Farewell (Knopf, 1960)
• The Underground Woman (Doubleday, 1975)

• Short Stories (Black Sun Press, 1929)
• Wedding Day and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930)
• The First Lover and Other Stories (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933)
• The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories (Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1936). The title story was winner of the 1935 O. Henry Award.
• Thirty Stories (Simon and Schuster, 1946). Includes "Defeat", winner of the 1941 O. Henry Award.
• The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (McGraw-Hill, 1951)
• Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (Doubleday, 1966)
• Fifty Stories (Doubleday, 1980)
• Life Being the Best and Other Stories (New Directions, 1988)

• The Youngest Camel (Little, Brown, 1939). Revised edition published as The Youngest Camel: Reconsidered and Rewritten (1959).
• Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep (Crowell-Collier, 1966)
• Pinky in Persia (Crowell-Collier, 1968)

• A Statement (1932)
• A Glad Day (1938)
• American Citizen: Naturalized in Leadville (1944)
• Collected Poems (1962)
• The Lost Dogs of Phnom Pehn (1968)
• Testament for My Students and Other Poems (1970)
• A Poem for February First (1975)
• This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985)
• Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (Copper Canyon Press, 1991)

• Relations & Complications. Being the Recollections of H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak. (1929), Forew. by T.P. O'Connor ( Gladys Milton Brooke) (ghost-written)
  Sandra Whipple Spanier (1986). 9780809312764, SIU Press. . ISBN 9780809312764
• Breaking the Silence: Why a Mother Tells Her Son about the Nazi Era (1962)
• The Last Rim of The World in "Why Work Series" (1966)
• Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930 (1968; with Robert McAlmon)
• Winter Night and a conversation with the author in New Sounds In American Fiction (1969)
• The Long Walk at San Francisco State and Other Essays (1970)
• Four Visions of America (1977; with others)
• Words That Must Somehow Be Said (edited by Elizabeth Bell; 1985)

• Don Juan, by Joseph Delteil (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931)
• Mr Knife, Miss Fork, by René Crevel (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931). A fragment of Babylon translated into English.
• The Devil in the Flesh, by Raymond Radiguet (Paris: Crosby Continental Editions, 1932)
• Babylon, by René Crevel (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985)

• Modern American Poetry
• New York review of books, articles by Kay Boyle
• WOSU Presents Ohioana Authors | Kay Boyle
• Kay Boyle Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Manuscripts and correspondence in Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University
• Kay Boyle Papers, 1914-1987 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center
• Kay Boyle addresses The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon as heard on WNYC, March 14, 1960. Boyle speaks starting at 2:35.
• "The Teaching of Writing," an essay, at Narrative Magazine.