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Three short novels

Kay Boyle interview with Kay Bonetti [sound recording].

Kay Boyle : a twentieth-century life in letters

"Kay Boyle knew everybody. In a long life (1902-1992) spent in motion between the United States and Europe she was the friend of Robert McAlmon (whose Being Geniuses Together she supplemented), with Harry and Caresse Crosby (founders of The Black Sun Press), Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst (with whom she fled World War II France), Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter, and a host of other powers and talents. Twice recipient of the O. Henry award for the best short story of the year (in 1935 for "The White Horses of Vienna" and 1941 for "Defeat"), Boyle was also an early contributor to Harriet Monroe's Poetry and published novels in every decade between the 1930s and 1990s. She published more than forty books, including fourteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, children's books, memoirs, and translations. Throughout her life Boyle wrote letters. Boyle was a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker from 1946 until 1953, when she and her Austrian husband were caught by McCarthy's red scare. Her famous correspondents include William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Stieglitz, Katherine Anne Porter, Howard Nemerov, Jessica Mitford, and Louise Erdrich. Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters gathers hundreds of her letters to tell in her own words the excitement, frustrations, intrigues, dangers, and satisfactions of the intersecting careers of Boyle and her friends. Candid and canny, Boyle wrote with freedom and wit, haste, ire, and affection. Her letters reveal as nothing else can her involvement with writing and writers"--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.

Online EBSCO University Press