Dates

• Existence: 1927-

Biography

Susan Elizabeth Kuehn was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1927 to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kuehn. Kuehn attended Lochinvar-West High School in Minneapolis. She continued her education at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, majoring in English Composition. In 1945 Kuehn was Mademoiselle's guest fiction editor. The following year her short story 'The Rosebush' won Mademoiselle's College Fiction Contest. That same story was also selected for publication in the 1947 edition of the O. Henry Prize Story Collection and Herschell Brickell's Prize Stories. Kuehn graduated from Wellesley in 1947 and began her six-year stint at the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, first as a reporter, and later as an editor of the Women's Pages.

At age twenty-two, she won a $2,000 creative writing fellowship at Stanford in Palo Alto, California. There, she published 'The Hunt', which was featured in Herschell Brickell's Prize Stories of 1950, and 'The Searchers,NULL which she wrote under the guidance of Wallace Stegner and published in Stanford Short Stories and Best American Short Stories. After a year, Kuehn returned home to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. She continued to write fiction, as well as non-fiction, and her work was published in magazines such as Redbook, The Writer, and Harpers. In addition, Kuehn performed graduate work at the University of Minnesota.

On August 28, 1954, Kuehn married Willard 'Sandy' Boyd, Jr. The Boyds settled in Iowa City, where Willard Boyd taught at the law school of the University of Iowa. He became president of the University of Iowa in 1969 and remained in that position until 1981. The Boyds lived in Iowa City for nearly twenty-six years, where they raised their three children-Willard 'Bill' Boyd III, Elizabeth 'Betsy', and Tom. In 1981, the Boyds moved to Chicago, where Willard Boyd acted as the director of the Field Museum. The Boyds returned to Iowa City in 1997.

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