In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism. Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the United States Department of State, and Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years. She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines. During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.
She and her husband were cleared by the United States Department of State in 1957.[5]
In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls' school. He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.
Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer's Conference at Wagner College in 1962. In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979.[6]
Kay Boyle with Bay Area historian Connie Young Yu in San Francisco, 1976.During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the "Americans Want to Know" fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[7] In her later years, she became an active supporter of Amnesty International and worked for the NAACP. After retiring from San Francisco State College, Boyle held several writer-in-residence positions for brief periods of time, including at Eastern Washington University in Cheney and the University of Oregon in Eugene.
She was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution.[8][9] As a result, for the first time in history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.[10]
Boyle died at a retirement community in Mill Valley, California on December 27, 1992.[2]
