Kay Boyle was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on February 19, 1902, to Howard Peterson
Boyle and his wife Katherine Evans Boyle. With the encouragement of her mother,
Kay
arrived in New York in 1922, determined to forge a literary career for herself.
Soon
her interest led her to Lola Ridge’s literary magazine Broom, which published her first poem "Morning" in 1923. That same year she married French-born Richard Brault; a
visit to his family in Brittany turned into an eighteen-year residence in Europe
for
Boyle.
In Paris Kay Boyle soon became a member of the American expatriate literary
community, achieving periodical publication for her writing in Ernest Walsh’s
This Quarter and in Eugene Jolas’ Transition. In 1929 Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press
published Boyle’s first book-length work, Short
Stories.
Following her divorce from Brault, she married artist-writer Laurence Vail in 1931.
During the 1930s Boyle worked hard at her craft, creating short stories, novels,
and
poems that garnered her a strong and growing reputation. Boyle found particular
success with the short story, winning the O. Henry award in 1935 and again in
1941.
In 1943, two years after her return to the United States, she divorced Vail and
married the Baron Joseph von Franckenstein.
At the end of the 1940s both Boyle and Franckenstein, again living in Europe, became
victims of McCarthyite witch-hunts. Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent
for The New Yorker, and Franckenstein his post in the
U.S. State Dept. As a result of these experiences the political aspect of Boyle’s
writing became increasingly strong and political activity a larger part of her
daily
life.
Following Franckenstein’s death in 1963 Kay Boyle accepted a creative writing
position at San Francisco State College. During her tenure at SFSC (1963-79) she
continued writing and her political activity as well as gaining wide acceptance
as a
teacher. Through the early to mid-1980s Boyle held other writer-in-residence positions
for briefer periods of time.
Kay Boyle died in Mill Valley, California, on December 27, 1992.
Sources:
“Boyle, Kay, 1902-1992,” in Contemporary Authors. New Revision
Series. Vol. 61, p. 103-107. Detroit: Gale, 1998.
Mellen, Joan. Kay Boyle, Author of Herself. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
Spanier, Sandra Whipple. Kay Boyle, Artist and
Activist. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Scope and Contents
The Kay Boyle Collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, and personal
documents. The collection is organized in three series: I. Works, 1955-84, II.
Correspondence, 1945-89, and III. Other Papers, 1948-90. In the first series the
works are arranged alphabetically by title, and the second alphabetically by
correspondent. The last series is arranged topically. This collection was previously
accessible through a card catalog but has been recataloged as part of a
retrospective conversion project.
Series I. includes a chapter from Kay Boyle’s unfinished Modern History of Germany
begun in 1961, along with several drafts of "A Poem for Samuel Beckett" dating from
the years 1981-84. Also present is an editorially-marked typescript and plate
proofs
for her 1955 novel The Seagull on the Step.
Found in Series II. is a small but important collection of letters to and from Kay
Boyle written in the years after World War II. There is a large group of letters
from Boyle to author Roy S. Simmonds written in the period beginning in 1973 when
Simmonds was researching his 1984 biography of William March. Also present here
are
twenty letters from Edward Dahlberg to Boyle written during 1967 along with a
single
prickly response from Boyle. Other correspondents include Samuel Beckett, Marcel
Duchamp, Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Carlos Williams.
Series III. contains an interesting response by Langston Hughes to, it appears,
Boyle’s criticism of Hughes’ "On the Road," along with
two contracts for Boyle’s 1948 short story collection Thirty
Stories.
Related Material
Additional material relating to Kay Boyle in the Ransom Center may be found in the
papers of Alfred A. Knopf Inc., Samuel Beckett, Noël Riley Fitch, Charles Henri
Ford, Bernard Malamud, Peter Matthiessen, and Evelyn Scott.
