BOYLE, KAY

born Feb. 19, 1902, St. Paul, Minn., U.S. died Dec. 27, 1992, Mill Valley, Calif. American poet, novelist, and short-story writer noted throughout her career as a keen and scrupulous student of the interior lives of characters in desperate situations. Boyle grew up mainly in Europe, where she was educated. Financial difficulties at the onset of World War I brought the family back to the United States, to Cincinnati, Ohio. In June 1923 she married and soon moved with her husband to France. Shortly after settling there she began publishing poems and short stories regularly in such periodicals as Broom, transition, and Harriet Monroe's Poetry; and in 1929 she published her first book, a collection entitled Wedding Day and Other Stories (U.S. ed. 1930). Her first novel, Plagued by the Nightingale, appeared in 1931. In that year she divorced her first husband and married Laurence Vail, an expatriate American writer with whom she lived in the French Alps until July 1941, when she returned to the United States. After World War II, married for a third time, she was stationed in France and West Germany while serving as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker (194653). She later taught at several colleges and universities in the United States, notably San Francisco State College. Boyle twice won the O. Henry Award for outstanding short storiesThe White Horses of Vienna (1935) and Defeat (1941). Among her notable novels are Monday Night (1938) and Generation Without Farewell (1960). Her major short-story collections include The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories (1936), The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951), and Fifty Stories (1980). Two critically acclaimed verse collections are Testament for My Students and Other Poems (1970) and This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985). Boyle's early works centred on the conflicts and disappointments that individuals encounter in their search for romantic love. Her later fiction usually dealt with the need for an individual's commitment to wider political or social causes as a prerequisite to attaining self-knowledge and fulfillment. Her writing was marked by great intelligence and sophistication, finely wrought and sometimes almost private language, and, particularly early on, a fascination for the morbid, decadent, and fastidious.