Kay Boyle

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Boyle, Kay (1903–94), born in Minnesota, was long an expatriate in France, returning to the U.S. in 1941. Her impressionistic stories appeared in Wedding Day (1930), First Lover (1933), The White Horses of Vienna (1936), The Crazy Hunter (1940), Thirty Stories (1946), The Smoking Mountain (1951), Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (1966), and Fifty Stories (1980). Her novels include Plagued by the Nightingale (1931), dealing with an American girl and her French husband, torn between the need to have a child so as to receive his legacy and the desire to avoid transmitting his hereditary disease; Year Before Last (1932), on a similar problem; Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933), about perverts; My Next Bride (1934), about American expatriates who must choose between love and money; Death of a Man (1936), concerning an American girl's renunciation of the love of a Nazi doctor; Monday Night (1938), psychological probing of character; The Youngest Camel (1939), an allegorical tale; Primer for Combat (1942), in diary form, about France during the Occupation; Avalanche (1943), a tale of espionage; A Frenchman Must Die (1946), story of a manhunt by an American member of the maquis; His Human Majesty (1949), about a foreign legion of ski troops training to attack the Nazis; Seagull on the Step (1955); Generation Without Farewell (1959), about Germans and Americans just after World War II; and The Underground Woman (1975), about a woman jailed for anti‐Vietnam War protest and her concern for her daughter involved in a cult. Poems are published in A Glad Day (1938); American Citizen (1944), about her Austrian refugee husband who became a U.S. soldier; Testament for My Students (1970), works written in the 1920s and '30s; and the selections mistitled Collected Poems (1962). The Long Walk at San Francisco State (1970) prints essays on social and political issues. She expanded the autobiography of Robert McAlmon as Being Geniuses Together (1968) by interspersing her own memoirs with his. Her Words That Must Somehow Be Said (1985) collects essays since 1927; This Is Not a Letter (1985) gathers poems; and Life Being the Best (1988) collects stories.

Kay Boyle 1903–93, American writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. A European expatriate in the interwar years, she returned to Europe as a correspondent for the New Yorker (1946–53) and subsequently taught English at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State Univ.). Her novels and stories often illuminate a desperate moment when courageous action is demanded although tragedy will probably result. Among her works are the novel Plagued by Nightingales (1931); short-story collections, Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (1966) and Fifty Stories (1980); and a collection of essays, The Long Walk at San Francisco State and Other Essays (1970).

Bibliography: See biography by J. Mellen (1994).