Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1902, and began her writing life in Paris during the 1920s, publishing in the expatriate magazine transition, and becoming friends with Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and other writers and artists. From 1923 to 1941 she lived in Austria, England, and France, and from 1946 to 1953 she was a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. She has published two dozen books of fiction, as well as a memoir of her Paris years, several books of nonfiction, and translations. She taught for seventeen years at San Francisco State University, and received two Guggenheim fellowships, two O. Henry Awards, the Before Columbus Foundation Award for lifetime achievement, a 1989 Lannan Literary Award, and many other honors.