Climbing the steps of Kay Boyle's four story Victorian home in San Francisco PW is greeted by an enormous poster for Amnesty International that has obviously been hanging on the front door for years. It seems a fitting symbol of the long and productive career of this civil rights activist whose personal stand against fascism, McCarthyism and Vietnam exacted a high price: a ruined marriage in the '40s, a blacklisted career in the '50s, a jail term for sit-ins in the '60s, near loss of a job during the San Francisco State College riots and, most recently (and voluntarily), cancellation of her next publishing contract, due to Doubleday's action against Gwen Davis.

It is Boyle's much-acclaimed literary career that prompts our visit, and once inside, we ask to see some of the books she had written since her first collection of short stories was published more than three decades ago. One by one, out they come—novels, short stories, poems, essays, children's titles—no fewer than 32 books by this indomitable figure of American letters, who for many years had been a regular and much-admired contributor to The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, Harper's and The Nation.

At 78 Kay Boyle is still an imposing presence: tall, thin, straight-backed and austere. She is magnificent and angular, her sharp features accentuated by a nose broken in a childhood accident that makes her face appear hatchetlike, aristocratic, imperious. Yet her voice is soft and full of vitality, and her smile disarming. When we place her most recent book, Fifty Stories, which Doubleday has just published, on top of the pile, the smile again creases her hawkish visage, reminding us of PW's Forecast observation that in her writing as well as in life, "Kay Boyle wears well."

he daughter of a wealthy Irishman who bungled his inheritance, Boyle remembers that she started out "almost retarded in reading and writing at first" and that if it hadn't been for a grandmother who gave her a book called Reading Without Tears she might never have started reading. She was, she says, "raised by strong women." When she was 14 and the editor of Poetry magazine wanted her to change a poem slightly, "My mother told me to change it if I wanted to do so, but not to compromise if I didn't want to change it. I didn't and the poem appeared anyway."

Thus began Kay Boyle's image as an uncompromising woman of principle who, though not as inflexible as some critics have suggested, would remain faithful to certain "indestructible values." One of these, ironically, is a belief that "education is a very destructive thing for creative people." Having taught creative writing at San Francisco State College (now California State University at San Francisco) for nearly 20 years, Boyle says, "The academic structure just squeezes it all out of you because that approach is to rely not on your emotions but your brain, and that can destroy a creative person. I used to tell my students at State, 'Don't take any more of these creative writing classes. Make this one the last!'"

Boyle's own formal education was haphazard at best. A student of architecture at Ohio Mechanics Institute, she was one of three females in a college of 1000 males and remembers spending much of her two years there "crawling under the pipes in the basement to the adjacent building, which happened to be the symphony hall, and hiding there listening to rehearsals."

She did not graduate, having fallen in love with a French exchange student. In the early 1920s, she married him, and they moved to Paris. There Boyle began writing immediately (her first short story appeared in transition), and she was befriended by American expatriates and international writers—among them, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. She also knew Robert McAlmon, whose later autobiography, Being Geniuses Together, she was to resurrect in 1968 and reedit with her own memoirs.

What did it feel like to live in a period of such immense literary significance? "Listen," Boyle says flatly, "much of what you read about the expatriates of the '20s and '30s is pure bunk. They didn't sit around in cafés. They were off writing somewhere to make a living. Students have asked me to describe the poetry readings of the time. My god! Nobody dared mention a work in progress, let alone read it aloud."

By this time, however, other writers had discovered Kay Boyle. Writing in The New Republic in 1931, Katherine Anne Porter said that Boyle was one of the "strongest new talents" and praised her for "a fighting spirit, freshness of feeling … [and] a violently dedicated search for the meanings and methods of art."

But it was her "fighting spirit" that got Boyle in and out of trouble. After divorcing her husband, she drifted into a bizarre commune run by Raymond Duncan (Isadora's brother) and a year later had to kidnap her own child from the commune in order to be free of the place.

Later, in the '30s and into the '40s, living in the Alps with her second husband, Cambridge scholar Laurence Vail, and their children, Boyle began helping Jews acquire U.S. visas—much to Vail's disapproval. "Marriage experts say it's the small things," sighs Boyle, recalling the breakup of her 12-year second marriage. "Someone leaves the cap off the toothpaste, that sort of thing. But with Laurence it was really a monumental political split. He told me that since I had never had a real education I could not understand that history moves in cycles and that the time had come for fascism to sweep across the world. There was nothing you could do about it but accept it, he told me. I have never accepted that premise. Never."

One of those she helped in obtaining a visa was Joseph von Franckenstein—not a Jew but a Roman Catholic, and an Austrian baron at that—whom she was later to marry. Returning to New York Boyle was "completely taken aback" at American anti-French sentiment. She immediately wrote Avalanche, a novel she believed was the first ever published to describe the French resistance to the Occupation. Meanwhile, von Franckenstein performed brilliantly as an American OSS agent and was appointed to the diplomatic corps in Germany after the war. It was there that the first rumors of his "Communist leanings" began.

"It was ridiculous, of course," Boyle recalls. "We were supposed to mix with people of all political parties, including the Communists." Investigations and hearings were to continue for years, and Boyle herself became the target of similar accusations; every magazine she had ever worked for came to her defense except The New Yorker, which, she said, fired her after she had served as a correspondent on retainer for seven years.

Having returned to the U.S. "in disgrace," the couple taught quietly at private schools and worked to clear themselves—which they did after nine years. By that time their life together was essentially over.

Von Franckenstein was reinstated in the diplomatic corps, only to learn he was dying of lung cancer. He had a series of operations. Boyle recalls, and "the doctors told me I had better get a job. San Francisco State had offered me the best position, so I flew there with Joseph in 1963; he died a few months later."

It was with his insurance money that Boyle purchased the Victorian house in which she was to live for the next 17 years. Retired now, she has finally decided to sell the house and move to Ireland, where she will research her next book. The Irish Women, which would have been published by Doubleday had Boyle not returned her advance and canceled her contract. This was not an agonizing decision: "I felt that after [Doubleday] turned against Gwen Davis I simply had no choice," she says in her uncompromising way. Then, obviously thinking of her McCarthy experience, she observes quietly, "You never know when it could strike again."