With the encouragement of her mother, Kay Boyle arrived in New York in 1922, determined to build a literary career. Lola Ridge’s literary magazine Broom published her first poem “Morning” in 1923. That same year she married French-born Richard Brault; a visit to his family in Brittany turned into an eighteen-year residence in Europe for Boyle. In Paris, Kay Boyle became a member of the American expatriate literary community, and in 1929 Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press published Boyle’s first book-length work, Short Stories.
Following her divorce from Brault, she married artist-writer Laurence Vail in 1931. That same year she was photographed by Man Ray. Throughout the 1930s Boyle created short stories, novels, and poems that garnered her a strong and growing reputation. Boyle found particular success with the short story, winning the O. Henry award in 1935 and again in 1941. In 1943, two years after her return to the United States, she divorced Vail and married the Baron Joseph von Franckenstein.
At the end of the 1940s both Boyle and Frankenstein, again living in Europe, became victims of McCarthyite witch-hunts. Boyle lost her position as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, and Franckenstein his post in the U.S. State Dept. As a result of these experiences, the political aspect of Boyle’s writing became increasingly strong and political activity a larger part of her daily life.
Following Franckenstein’s death in 1963 Kay Boyle accepted a creative writing position at San Francisco State. During her tenure she continued writing and her political activity as well as gaining wide acceptance as a teacher. S.I. Hiyakawa, in the position of president of San Francisco State ten years before he was to become a United States Senator, claimed in 1967 that “Kay Boyle is the most dangerous woman in America!”