Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle | |
---|---|
St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S. | |
Died | December 27, 1992 Mill Valley, California, U.S. | (aged 90)
Nationality | American |
Spouse |
|
Partner | Ernest Walsh (1926) |
Children | 6[1] |
Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist.
Early years
The granddaughter of a publisher, Boyle was born in
Boyle was educated at the exclusive
Marriages and family life
That same year, she met and married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and they moved to France in 1923. This resulted in her staying in Europe for the better part of the next twenty years. Separated from her husband, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh, with whom she had a daughter, Sharon, named for the Rose of Sharon, in March 1927, five months after Walsh's death from tuberculosis in October 1926.[3]
In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to
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.[3] After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.[2]
McCarthyism, later life
In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s
She and her husband were cleared by the United States Department of State in 1957.[5]
In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in
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.[6]
During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to
She was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a
Boyle died at a retirement community in Mill Valley, California on December 27, 1992.[2]
Legacy
In her lifetime Kay Boyle published more than 40 books, including 14 novels, eight volumes of poetry, 11 collections of short fiction, three children's books, and French to English translations and essays. Most of her papers and manuscripts are in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. Morris Library has the Ruby Cohn Collection of Kay Boyle Letters and the Alice L. Kahler Collection of Kay Boyle Letters.[11] A comprehensive assessment of Boyle's life and work was published in 1986 titled Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist by Sandra Whipple Spanier. In 1994 Joan Mellen published a voluminous biography of Kay Boyle, Kay Boyle: Author of Herself.[12]
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".[13]
Bibliography
Novels
- Process (written in 1925, unpublished until 2001 )
- Plagued by the Nightingale (1931)
- Year Before Last (1932)
- Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933)
- My Next Bride (1934)
- Death of a Man (1936)
- Yellow Dusk (Bettina Bedwell) (ghostwritten) (1937)[14]
- Monday Night (1938)
- The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels (The Crazy Hunter, The Bridegroom's Body, and Big Fiddle) (1940)
- Primer for Combat (1942)
- Avalanche (1944)
- A Frenchman Must Die (1946)
- 1939 (1948)
- His Human Majesty (1949),
- The Seagull on the Step (1955)
- Three Short Novels (The Crazy Hunter,The Bridegroom's Body, Decision) (1958)
- Generation Without Farewell (1960)
- The Underground Woman (1975)
- Winter Night (1993)
Story collections
- Short Stories (1929)
- Wedding Day and Other Stories (1930)
- The First Lover and Other Stories (1933)
- The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories (1935) (The title story was winner of the O. Henry Award)
- Thirty Stories (1946) (Includes Defeat (1941), winner of the O. Henry Award)
- The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951)
- Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (1966)
- Fifty Stories (1980)
- Life Being the Best and Other Stories (1988)
Juvenile
- The Youngest Camel (1939), revised edition published as The Youngest Camel: Reconsidered and Rewritten (1959)
- Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep (1966)
- Pinky in Persia (1968)
Poetry collections
- 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)
Non-fiction
- 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)[14]
- 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)
Translations
- 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)
References
- ^ "Kay Boyle". Ohioana Authors. Archived from the original on November 9, 2006.
- ^ New York Times. Retrieved 2016-05-30.
- ^ a b c Spanier, Sandra (2015). Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. Iiii.
- ^ "Remembering Harry Crosby: Kay Boyle, John Wheelwright". Retrieved March 18, 2010.
- New York Times. April 22, 1957. Retrieved 2016-05-30.
- ^ "Kay Boyle Biography". Retrieved August 28, 2015.
- ^ Writers and Editors War Tax Protest page 2.
- ^ "Letters from Thane Read asking Helen Keller to sign the World Constitution for world peace. 1961". Helen Keller Archive. American Foundation for the Blind. Retrieved 2023-07-01.
- ^ "Letter from World Constitution Coordinating Committee to Helen, enclosing current materials". Helen Keller Archive. American Foundation for the Blind. Retrieved 2023-07-03.
- ^ "Preparing earth constitution | Global Strategies & Solutions | The Encyclopedia of World Problems". The Encyclopedia of World Problems | Union of International Associations (UIA). Retrieved 2023-07-15.
- ^ Kay Boyle Letters at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University
- ISBN 978-0-374-18098-0.
- ^ "Kay Boyle: Awards and Honors". Ohioana Authors list.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8093-1276-4.
External links
- Works by Kay Boyle at Open Library
- Modern American Poetry Archived 2008-12-19 at the Wayback Machine
- 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 at Find a Grave
- 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.