Kay Boyle

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Kay Boyle, photographed by Al Ravenna, 1944

Kay Boyle (born February 19, 1902 in Saint Paul , Minnesota , † December 27, 1992 in Mill Valley , California ) was an American writer and journalist . In the McCarthy era , Boyle was suspected of un-American activities.

Kay Boyle's work includes fourteen novels, eight collections of short stories, seven volumes of poetry and three volumes of essays, and four children's books.

Life

Kay Boyle came from a wealthy family; her father was a successful lawyer in Saint Paul. She spent her childhood on the east coast of the United States and got to know Europe at a young age while traveling with her family . The Boyle family later settled in Cincinnati , where Kay studied architecture at New York's Parson’s School of Fine and Applied Arts , violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music , and made a living as a telephone operator and cashier . In 1922 Kay worked in New York as a columnist for a small magazine . In the same year she married the French engineer Richard Brault and a year later moved with her husband to Brittany . Very soon she belonged to the circle of friends around Samuel Beckett , Nancy Cunard , William Carlos Williams , James Joyce , Archibald MacLeish , Hart Crane and Robert McAlmon .

The couple separated in 1926 and Boyle moved to Grasse , where she lived with the poet Ernest Walsh . Walsh had just published the first two issues of the avant-garde literary magazine This Quarter . He died of consumption in October 1926 and the pregnant Boyle moved to Paris . Her early poems and short stories appeared in avant-garde literary magazines by Nancy Cunard , Janet Flanner, and Sylvia Beach , alongside works by Ezra Pound , Gertrude Stein , Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway .

In 1932 the writer married Laurence Vail , with whom she will have three daughters. You lived alternately in France , England and Austria . Vail was a Dadaist sculptor and painter and the ex-husband of Peggy Guggenheim . Against the background of fascism and National Socialism in the 1930s, Kay Boyle made contemporary history her subject. In Austria, from 1933 to 1936, she was an eyewitness to the events in neighboring Germany and discussed National Socialism. In 1941 Kay Boyle left war-torn Europe with her family, with whom she had lived in Megève , France since 1937 , and returned to the United States. After divorcing her second husband, Boyle married the German-Austrian classical philologist Joseph Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein in 1943 , with whom she later had two children. Her husband had left Austria shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and was now working in the US State Department. The Freifrau von und zu Franckenstein published novels about the German occupation of France and the Resistance and wrote for various American newspapers.

In 1946 Kay Boyle returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker with the assignment to report on Germany. However, she initially refused to live in Germany and went to Paris with her family, from where she went on research trips to Germany. Only in May 1948 did she move to Marburg with her three youngest children , where her husband worked as a press officer for the military government . At the end of 1948 the family moved to Frankfurt am Main , where her husband published Die neue Zeitung , a German-language newspaper for the Americans.

In 1953, at the instigation of Roy Cohn , her husband was released from his position in the Public Affairs Division of the US State Department, and Kay Boyle was also a victim of McCarthyism . Not only did she lose her job as the New Yorker's foreign correspondent , but she was also unable to work for most of the major publications.

The family settled in Connecticut and her husband Joseph Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein taught at a private school for girls. After his rehabilitation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent him to Persia and he became a cultural attaché in Tehran . He died of a serious illness in 1963. Kay Boyle was politically active in the NAACP civil rights movement and for Amnesty International . She went on trips, including to Cambodia in 1966 and repeatedly to Ireland , her “spiritual home”. She taught creative writing at San Francisco State University from 1963 to 1979 .

Awards

Works

Novels

  • Process. A novel . University Press, Urbana, Ill. 2001, ISBN 0-252-02668-3 .
  • The silence of the nightingale. Roman ("Plagued by the Nightingale"). New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1993, ISBN 3-8015-0268-6 .
  • The year before. Roman ("Year Before Last"). New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1994, ISBN 3-8015-0277-5 .
  • Gentlemen, I Address You Privately . Capra Press, Santa Barbara, Calif. 1991, ISBN 0-88496-318-7 .
  • My next bride Roman ("My Next Bride"). New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 2000, ISBN 3-8015-0314-3 .
  • Death of a Man. A novel . New Directions, New York 1989, ISBN 0-8112-1089-8 .
  • Monday night . Apple Books, New York 1977, ISBN 0-911858-35-0 .
  • Three short novels . New Directions, New York 1993, ISBN 0-8112-1233-5 (Contents: The Crazy Hunter , The Bridgegroom's Body , Decision ).
  • Primer for Combat . Simon & Schuster, New York 1942.
  • Avalanche. A novel . Simon & Schuster, New York 1944.
  • A Frenchman Must Die . Simon & Schuster, New York 1946.
  • 1939. A Novel . Simon & Schuster, New York 1948.
  • His Human Majesty . Whittlesey House. New York 1949.
  • The Seagull on the Step . Knopf, New York 1955.
  • Generation without saying goodbye. Roman ("Generation Without Farewell"). Scherz Verlag, Stuttgart 1962.
  • The Underground Woman . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1975, ISBN 0-385-07047-0 .

Poems

  • A statement . 1932.
  • A glad day . New Directions Publ., Norfolk, Conn. 1938.
  • American Citizen, Naturalized in Leadville. A poem . New York 1944.
  • Collected poems . Knopf, New York 1962.
  • The Lost Dogs of Phnom Penh .
  • Testament for My Students and Other Poems . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1970.
  • A Poem for February First .
  • This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems . Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles 1985, ISBN 0-940650-61-4 .
  • Collected Poems of Kay Boyle . Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend 1991, ISBN 1-55659-038-5 .

Short stories

  • A hasty bunch. Short stories . University Press, Carbondale, Ill. 1977, ISBN 0-8093-0798-7 .
  • Wedding Day and Other Stories . Pharus Edition, London 1932.
  • The First Lover and Other Stories . Smith & Haas, New York 1935.
  • The White Horses of Vienna ("The White Horses of Vienna"). New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-8015-0289-9 .
  • The Astronomer's Wife . 1936.
  • Defeat . 1941.
  • Thirty Stories . New Directions Publ., New York 1957.
  • The smoking mountain. Stories from Postwar Germany ("The Smoking Mountain. Stories of Postwar Germany"). Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1994, ISBN 3-596-11820-4 .
  • Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1966.
  • Fifty Stories Norton Books, London 1992, ISBN 0-8112-1206-8 .
  • Life Being the Best and Other Stories . New Directions Publ., New York 1988, ISBN 0-8112-1052-9 .

Children's books

  • The little camel ("The Youngest Camel"). Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1998, ISBN 3-596-85017-7 .
  • Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep . Crowell-Collier, New York 1966.
  • Pinky in Persia . Crowell-Crollier, New York 1968.
  • Winter night . Creative Education Preess, Mankato, Minn. 1993, ISBN 0-88682-576-8 .

Non-fiction

  • Relations & Complications. Being the Recollections of HH The Dayang Muda of Sarawak . 1929.
  • Breaking the Silence. Why a Mother Tells Her Son about the Nazi Era . American Jewish Committee, New York 1962.
  • The Last Rim of The World .
  • Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930 . North Point Press, San Francisco 1984, ISBN 0-86547-149-5 .
  • The Long Walk at San Francisco State and Other Essays . Grove Press, New York 1970.
  • Four Visions of America . Capra Press, Santa Barbara, Calif. 1977, ISBN 0-88496-126-5 (with Erica Jong , Thomas Sanchez and Henry Miller ).
  • Words That Must Somehow Be Said. Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927-1984 . North Point Press, San Francisco 1985, ISBN 0-86547-187-8 .

Secondary literature

  • Thomas C. Austenfeld: American women writers and the Nazis. Ethics and politics in Boyle, Porter , Stafford and Hellman . University Press, Charlottesville, Va 2001, ISBN 0-8139-2052-3 .
  • M. Clark Chambers: Kay Boyle: A Bibliography . St. Paul's Bibliographies, Winchester 2002, ISBN 1-58456-063-0 .
  • Marilyn Elkins (Ed.): Critical Essays on Kay Boyle . Hall Books, New York 1997, ISBN 0-7838-0012-6 .
  • Hugh Ford: Four Lives in Paris . North Point Press, San Francisco, Calif. 1987, ISBN 0-86547-250-5 .
  • Zofia P. Lesinska: Perspectives of Four Women Writers on the Second World War. Gertrude Stein , Janet Flanner , Kay Boyle, and Rebecca West . Verlag, Lang, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8204-6103-2 ( Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory ; 17).
  • Joan Mellen: Kay Boyle, Author of Herself . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1994, ISBN 0-374-18098-9 .
  • Thomas Reuther: The Germany of the occupation as a topic in The Smoking Mountain , in: ders., The ambivalent normalization. Discourse on Germany and images of Germany in the USA, 1941–1955. Stuttgart 2000. pp. 270-274.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Members: Kay Boyle. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 17, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Boyle, Kay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Paul , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 1992
Place of death Mill Valley , California