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Overview
In her long, prolific, and tumultuous career, Kay Boyle (1902-92) published more than thirty volumes of fiction and poetry to awards and acclamations, always mining a rich vein of autobiography and innovation. Her reputation, however, has only recently begun to reemerge from the long shadow cast over it by her struggle against McCarthyism, returning to American letters some of the most vigorous writing of this century. In Joan Mellen's groundbreaking and provocative biography of Kay Boyle - the first ever - the full sweep of her remarkable life is revealed. As the golden girl of expatriate Paris, Kay Boyle included among her friends James Joyce, Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp, Picabia, Brancusi, and Archibald MacLeish. A literary figure in her own right, she became one of the most important contributors to the seminal magazine transition, virtually invented what came to be known as The New Yorker story, and was awarded two O. Henry Prizes for her short fiction. Kay Boyle took lovers, bore them children, and married three times. She struggled against fascism in Austria and on behalf of the Resistance in France, and in her seventh decade went to prison for her opposition to the Vietnam War. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself is a rare look at one of the finest writers of this American century, and at a woman who was independent, self-sufficient, and self-directed, long before these categories were acknowledged, let alone approved. Kay Boyle's was a life rich in purpose, in love, and in work.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Mellen's intimate, admiring, captivating biography of Boyle (1902-1992), short story writer, poet, novelist, memoirist and political activist, follows her egocentric trajectory as a ``citizen of the planet.'' Fiercely ambitious, romantic, Minnesota-born Boyle moved to Paris in the 1920s, becoming a modernist writer and ``golden girl'' of the expatriate set. In the 1930s, living in Vienna with her second husband Laurence Vail, a surrealist painter, Boyle wrote emotive anti-Nazi pieces meant to show, as Mellen observes, how fascism ``might be seen as a means to self-respect by ordinarily moral, indeed virtuous people.'' A New Yorker correspondent in postwar Europe, Boyle returned to the U.S. with her third husband, Austrian baron Joseph von und zu Franckenstein, to defeat a McCarthyite witchhunt branding them traitors. Boyle, living in the San Francisco area, emerged in the '60s as a writer of social conscience, fighting racism, militarism and the Vietnam war, but in her politics, as in her self-dramatizing fiction, she was ``heroine of her own life,'' notes Mellen ( The Waves at Genji's Door ). An antifeminist who deemed the women's movement too narrow, she bore six children, viewing procreation as ``a woman's natural destiny.'' Although Boyle was then forced to write for money, subverting her talent, Mellen makes a plausible case that her finest work, in particular her short stories, should be revived. Photos not seen by PW . (Apr.)Library Journal
Driven by a mother who insisted she become a creative artist, prolific short story writer, poet, and novelist Boyle (1902-92) began writing at age five and never quit. A fascinating woman who lived on her own terms, Boyle was married three times, lived abroad for an extended period, authored more than 30 books, mothered six children, and became a social activist. Her literary fame reached is peak in the late 1930s, when, writing short stories for The New Yorker, she was hailed as one of the greatest of contemporary writers. Mellen (English, Temple Univ.) shows how after this point the sociopolitical climate of postwar America contributed to Boyle's decline as a writer, but she also makes it clear that Boyle squandered her talent by writing pulp for the mass market. Mellen emphasizes Boyle's life rather than her work, complementing the literary analysis in Sandra Spanier's Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (Southern Illinois Univ. Pr., 1986). This thorough and at times damning study is recommended for public libraries.-Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.Donna Seaman
Kay Boyle is remembered primarily for her startlingly fresh and modern short stories. Showcased most prominently in the "New Yorker" during the 1930s and 1940s, these gems abruptly begin "smack in the middle of things," the very spot Boyle made sure she occupied throughout her long, hectic life. Mellen, a consistently absorbing writer (no small feat in such a long book), gamely follows Boyle from her indulgent childhood into her regal old age, from her spectacular success to her descent into schlock, and all through her weathering of numerous illnesses and a vicious McCarthy-era investigation. A great beauty--tall, slender, black-haired, and blue-eyed--as well as a workaholic, Boyle, in spite of never receiving much of an education, was encouraged to be a writer by her adoring and ambitious mother. She also thrived on turmoil. As she burned her way through passionate affairs, tumultuous marriages, and seven pregnancies, Boyle never stopped writing and never let anyone else's needs interfere with her compulsion. As Mellen discusses Boyle's immense oeuvre, unusual experiences, and humanitarian outlook, she praises Boyle for her incredible literary prolificity without hesitating to describe how much Boyle's hastiness, didacticism, and need to write for money diminished her artistic prowess and integrity. Mellen is also candid about how profoundly Boyle's children suffered from their mother's shameless self-absorption. Flamboyant flaws and all, Boyle was an extraordinary and captivating woman.Book Details
Published
February 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
Pages
670
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780374180980