Kay Boyle didn’t fuck around.
1922, she shows up in New York with her mother’s blessing, not that she probably needed it, dead set on making it as a writer. And she did. By ’23, her first poem’s in print. “Morning” in Lola Ridge’s magazine Broom. Not bad for a couple of months work.
Then she marries this French guy, Richard Brault. What was supposed to be a quick trip to meet the in-laws in Brittany turns into eighteen years in Europe. These things happen.
Paris, late twenties. Boyle’s running with the American expat crowd, brilliant and broke and probably drunk, convinced they’re changing the world with words. Maybe they were. Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press puts out her first book in ’29. Short Stories. Simple title. Confident.
She dumps Brault, marries artist/writer Laurence Vail in ’31. Man Ray takes her picture, because Man Ray is awesome. The thirties are good to her. Stories, novels, poems. She’s building something real, a reputation that matters. Two O. Henry awards, ’35 and ’41. She was good at the short form. Brutal efficiency. No wasted motion.
1943, she’s back in the States, ditches Vail, marries a Baron. Joseph von Franckenstein.
You can’t make this shit up.
Then the late forties happen, and America loses its goddamn mind. McCarthyism. Witch-hunts. Both Boyle and Franckenstein get their careers torched, her gig as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, his State Department position, gone. Because that’s what we did to people who made us uncomfortable, who didn’t fit the narrative, who were, you know, interesting.
So naturally, Boyle gets more political. Her writing sharpens, gets angrier. She starts showing up, putting her body where her words are.
Franckenstein dies in ’63. She takes a teaching job at San Francisco State. Keeps writing, keeps protesting, keeps being who she is. Students love her. The establishment? Not so much. S.I. Hayakawa, yeah, that Hayakawa, the one who’d become a Senator, calls her “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1967.
She probably took that as a compliment.