B oyle, K ay

Kay Boyle (1902–92) considered writing, personal integrity, and political activism as inseparable. A modernist who helped revolutionize literary style, she was also a woman who chose sexual freedom but embraced motherhood. An expatriate in France and Austria from 1923 to 1941 and a keen observer and critic of totalitarianism in Austria and Germany, she also became a historically thoughtful chronicler of the American occupation of Germany after 1945. She was victimized by loyalty‐security hearings in 1952, taught at San Francisco State University from 1962 to 1979, and protested against the Vietnam War. Boyle wrote short fiction, novels, essays, poems, and memoirs. By revising Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 and interspersing her own chapters to reissue the book in 1968, she became one of the historiographers of modernism. Among her close literary associates were William Carlos Williams, Emanuel Carnevali, Samuel Beckett, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Eugene Jolas, Marianne Moore, Robert Carlton Brown, and Howard Nemerov. “Artist and activist” (in Sandra Spanier's words) through eight decades, Boyle embodies many of the contradictions of the twentieth century but also helped write its literary history.