Kay Boyle: Example to the Young

Katherine Anne Porter

doi:10.2307/441209

Boyle, Kay (1902–1992)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1553-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Bryony Randall

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

Later Life ◽

Men And Women ◽

Political Activist ◽

Story Writer ◽

Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle was a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and political activist. Born in St Paul, Minnesota, she married a Frenchman, Richard Brault, in 1922 and moved to France with him the following year. She then lived in Europe for most of the next twenty years, and her early novels frequently reflect her own experiences as an expatriate. Languid and impressionistic in style, her early prose work focuses on relationships between men and women. In later life she also became heavily involved in politics and her work took on a more urgent social tenor; for example, the 1936 novel Death of a Man alerted readers to the threat of Nazism.

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Collected Poems of Kay Boyle by Kay Boyle

Western American Literature ◽

10.1353/wal.1993.0008 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 166-167

Author(s):

Charles Daughaday

Keyword(s):

Kay Boyle

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Textual Authority and Modern American Autobiography: Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle, and the Writing of a Lost Generation

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875801006685 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 35 (3) ◽

pp. 485-497 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

CRAIG MONK

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Original Form ◽

Original Text ◽

Lost Generation ◽

Professional Obligations ◽

American Writer ◽

Present Book ◽

Textual Authority ◽

History Of ◽

Kay Boyle

By the mid-1960s, American writer Kay Boyle was in possession of a three-book contract from Doubleday publishers in New York. The cornerstone of this deal was to be a history of Germany, a manuscript she began in the late 1950s. Boyle encountered difficulties completing this work, and after lobbying successfully to write a history of German women instead, she eventually abandoned the project altogether. To help her meet her professional obligations, Boyle hoped that Doubleday would accept a new plan to republish Three Short Novels, a work that had appeared under the Beacon imprint in 1958. That publisher still had four thousand copies of the book in its warehouse, however, and Doubleday editor Ken McCormick was unable to agree to Boyle’s proposal. McCormick suggested instead that she undertake work revising Robert McAlmon’s 1938 autobiography, Being Geniuses Together. Indeed, in the years following his death in 1956, Boyle had been unsuccessful in locating an American publisher for her friend’s book, so when Doubleday brought forward an edition of the work in 1968, it contained alternate chapters written by Kay Boyle, herself. McAlmon’s original text is approximately one hundred and ten thousand words in length; Boyle’s edition is one hundred and sixty thousand words, only seventy thousand of which were written by Robert McAlmon. ‘‘This present book is his,’’ Boyle wrote of McAlmon’s achievement in her 1984 afterword (333), and while one might argue that this is the case, no one can question the fact that his book was altered substantially from its original form.

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