Author. Kay Boyle, an American author, educator and political activist, received much recognition in the early 20th century. Drawing from her experiences as an American young lady expatriated in Paris, France during the roaring 1920s and considered to many as a genius of the "Lost Generation," she published more than forty novels, eleven collections of short stories and fourteen collections of poetry, all very autobiographical. She was awarded two O. Henry Prizes for her short fictions, "The White Horses of Vienna" in 1935 and "Defeat" in 1941. Born the daughter of a lawyer, her mother was the one with literary talents, and her grandfather was a publisher. From a young age, she was taught to help the underdog. As a young child, she had serious bouts of whooping cough, thyroid, and measles, putting her behind her classmates. She attended private schools and studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati and used two Guggenheim Fellowships to further her career. Her first book was "Short Stories" in 1929. Starting in 1932, she was a pioneer writer for the magazine "The New Yorker." For the magazine, she covered World War II while residing in Europe, then in the 1950s covered post-war reconstruction in Germany, but was blackballed by the magazine during the McCarthyism years. Politically, she struggled with Fascism in Austria, being part of the French Resistance during World War II, went against McCarthyism in the 1950s, and while over 70 years old, was jailed twice in 1967 for her opposition of the Vietnam War. She became an active supporter of Amnesty International, worked for the NAACP, and advocated banning nuclear weapons. Late in her career, she wrote a half-dozen non-fictions on her political thoughts. Much of her writings were taken from her complex personal experiences of her love affairs and three marriages. She was a talented, fiercely independent woman with large dark eyes, donned in bright red lipstick and dangling earrings, and traveling in the circles of the best artists and writers of the era. Traveling to Paris after her 1922 marriage to a French engineer, Richard Brault, she met Ernest Walsh, a world-traveled American poet, who died of tuberculosis in 1926 on the French Riviera. Their daughter was born five months after Walsh's death. Her 1932 novel "Year Before Last" was a memorial to Walsh. She attempted a reunion in England with Brault, but that failed, thus she traveled to Paris to write with the support system of other writers. In 1928 she met the writer and painter, Laurence Vail and she and Vail, as newly divorced, married in 1932. Living in the Austrian Alps, she bored him three daughters, had a much-publicized affair with a handsome ski instructor, and divorced Vail to marry her third husband, Baron Joseph von Franckenstein. He had been her daughters' tutor. Franckenstein's ancestors claimed to own for over 300 years the German castle, which was the inspiration for Mary Shelley's widely-recognized horror story of the manufacturing of the Frankenstein monster. With her help, Franckenstein , as her lover, escaped the Nazi concentration camps, if not death. Her life's saga reads like more of an adventurous fiction than the truth. Franckenstein would come to the United States, join the army, infiltrated the Gestapo as an Allied spy, but his cover was blown, then tortured, and sentenced to a firing squad, but saved at the last minute by American troops. Among her six 1930s novels, "Death of a Man" in 1936 was an attacked on the Nazi Party, placing her name on the Gestapo watch list. "The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels" in 1938 may have been Boyle's last piece that was wrote "more for art than money." From that point, her typewriter became the source of her income. "A Frenchman Must Die" is a 1946 novel about urban guerilla-style opposition during World War II to the Vichy government. During World War II in 1941, she left her husband, Vail, returning to the United States with her daughters. She married Franckenstein in 1943. The couple had a daughter and son, making a total of six children for her, yet her career was always her top priority. During the early 1950s in the middle of McCarthyism, bitter allegations were given toward her and her husband. The couple lost their jobs; she was blacklisted by most publishers, but was cleared by the United States Department of State of any charges in 1957. At that point, her husband returned to his federal post with the Department of State. After her husband's death in 1963, she was an author-in-residence, teaching at Wagner College in New York City, San Francisco State College, and a number of other colleges for a short time, retiring from teaching in 1978. She held a membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she occupied the Henry James chair. In 1980 she received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for "extraordinary contribution to American literature over a lifetime of creative work." Throughout her life, she translated French novels into English. She gave an interview in 1988 on the NBC morning show, the "Today Show." She authored three children's books. She died at the age of ninety in a retirement home, outliving one of her daughters and her only son. Her last novel "Winter Night" was published posthumously in 1993. Using handwritten notes given to her by Boyle, her first biography was published in 1986, "Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist" by Sandra Spanier. Joan Mellen's 1994 biography, "Kay Boyle: Author of Herself" gives much insight into this author's life. In 1991, her complete verse was published in "Collected Poems of Kay Boyle."