From her strong mother, she learned the true values of life,"the search for and affirmation of that which the hand could not touch". At the age of eighteen, she moved to New York with her sister who worked as a designer for Vogue magazine. After a disliked job as a secretary to a fashion writer, she took a job filing and typing for an artsy literary magazine.
In 1922, she moved to France with Richard Brault her first husband, who was a French exchange student she met in Cincinnati. Anticipating to be in France for only a few, short months, Kay Boyle ended up staying for eighteen years. While there, she wrote,"That was a winter of tremendous and determined walking. In the twelve hours of every weekday that I was alone, I wrote or I walked, and there was not an avenue or alley, a dock or jetty, of Le Havre that I did not know. I collected stones and driftwood from the beach, that harsh, unforgiving beach where shells could not survive an hour but were ground to sound by the beating of the surf. I walked, and I wrote poetry, and I began my second novel, the story of the family in Brittany..."
Still married to Brault, she started a correspondence with poet Earnest Walsh with whom she ultimately fell in love. Together, they worked on the literary journal,"This Quarter," of which he was editor. She left her husband to live with Walsh in the South of France and bore him her first child three months after he died of tuberculosis. She moved to Paris after his death with their daughter, Sharon. In Paris, she played an important role of the group of writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation. Boyle urged the facts on why so many Americans moved to Paris and became known was so they could "live cheaply enough to produce their work".
In 1932, she married her second husband, Laurence Vail, a painter and soon to be writer, who was formerly married to American heiress, Peggy Guggenheim. She spend twelve years with Vail, conceived him three daughters (Apple Joan, Clover, and Kathe), and wrote believably her best work.
Although during World War 2, her and her family traveled to Lisbon by train. She met Austrian, Joseph Franckestein and was hired as a tutor for her children. In 1943, she divorced Laurence Vail, and moved on to her third husband, Franckestein in the same year. She gave birth to one child, a son. In the fifties, Kay Boyle's short stories were not profitable because Joseph and her were blacklisted. He couldn't get a regular job anywhere. "How many people suffered! Arthur Miller. Pete Seeger. Langston Hughes. Lillian Hellman... But neither Joseph, nor I had ever been a member of any party whatsoever, and we didn't have many Communist friends. The charges were just something that had been completely invented." They spent the next nine years fighting those charges, where the family resided in Connecticut.
Her third, and last husband died of lung cancer and in 1963, she had several children to support. And so, she moved to the West Coast to take a job teaching at San Francisco State University where she taught writing for the next twenty years. Boyle later became active in the movement against the Vietnam War and was sent to jail twice in 1967 for her activism.
Awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, she was one of the first women to be inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy. She died in Mill Valley in 1993 at the age of ninety.
"There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in."
-Kay Boyle
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