Discipline: Literature

Kay Boyle

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1960, 1961, 1965
Kay Boyle (1902—1992) was an American writer and political activist noted throughout her career as a keen and scrupulous student of the interior lives of characters in desperate situations. Boyle grew up mainly in Europe, where she was educated. Financial difficulties at the onset of World War I took the family back to the U.S. In June 1923 she married and soon moved to France where she began publishing poems and short stories regularly in expatriate periodicals. In 1929 she published her first book, a collection entitled Wedding Day and Other Stories. Her first novel, Plagued by the Nightingale, appeared in 1931. In 1941, she returned to the U.S., but went back to Europe after World War II and worked as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker (1946–53). She and her third husband, Joseph, baron von Franckenstein, an Austrian who became an American citizen and worked for the U.S. foreign service, faced Senate loyalty hearings during the McCarthy era. Boyle later taught at several colleges and universities, notably San Francisco State College (now University). Believing that privilege brings social responsibility, she was a political activist throughout her life. She twice won the O. Henry Award for outstanding short stories, for “The White Horses of Vienna” (1935) and “Defeat” (1941). Among her notable novels are Monday Night (1938) and Generation Without Farewell (1960). Her major short-story collections include The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories (1936), The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951), and Fifty Stories (1980). Two critically acclaimed verse collections are Testament for My Students and Other Poems (1970) and This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985). Her complete verse was published in Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991). Boyle and Robert McAlmon coauthored Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930 (1968, reissued 1997), a book McAlmon began in 1934 that was revised after his death by Boyle, who wrote alternate chapters and added an afterword. The book provides a detailed, firsthand portrait of the expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s. Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927–1984 was published in 1985. Process, a long-lost first novel by Boyle (written about 1924) was discovered and edited by Sandra Spanier and published posthumously in 2001.

Studios

Mansfield

Kay Boyle worked in the Mansfield studio.

The Helen Coolidge Mansfield Studio was donated by graduates of the Mansfield War Service Classes for Reconstruction Aides. Helen Mansfield helped found the New York MacDowell Club. The small, shingled frame structure with stone foundation was originally fronted on the west side by a neat white picket fence and gate, a garden, and a stone pathway…

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