Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters

Kay Boyle

Jun 2015 · University of Illinois Press

About this ebook

One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children's books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time.

Kay Boyle shared the first issue of This Quarter with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, expressed her struggles with poetry to William Carlos Williams and voiced warm admiration to Katherine Anne Porter, fled WWII France with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, socialized with the likes of James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett, and went to jail with Joan Baez. The letters in this first-of-its-kind collection, authorized by Boyle herself, bear witness to a transformative era illuminated by genius and darkened by Nazism and the Red Scare. Yet they also serve as milestones on the journey of a woman who possessed a gift for intense and enduring friendship, a passion for social justice, and an artistic brilliance that earned her inclusion among the celebrated figures in her ever-expanding orbit.

About the author

Kay Boyle(1902–1992) published over forty books, twice won the O'Henry award for best short story of the year, and worked as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. Her books include Process: A Novel and Fifty Stories. Sandra Spanier is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and general editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. She is the author of Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist and editor of Boyle's Life Being the Best and Other Stories and Process: A Novel.