Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist

by Sandra Spanier

This first critical assessment of Kay Boyle’s long career is both a portrait of the artist and a perceptive appraisal of her work.



Kay Boyle’s writing initially appeared with that of the great experimenters of the 1920s, and through the rest of this century hers has remained a vital, origin­al voice. Spanier examines all of Boyle’s work, tracing central themes and concerns that create a single coherent body out of greatly diversified writing that in­cludes 14 novels, 10 collections of short stories, 5 volumes of poetry, 3 children’s books, and 2 essay collections.



Because Boyle’s work always springs directly and immediately from personal experience, this book is necessarily a biography. Boyle herself has provided Spanier with letters, unpublished man­uscripts, and pages of personal comment on this study. While the book definitely remains Spanier’s, Kay Boyle’s coopera­tion and participation make the work special.

261 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 1986

About the author

Sandra Spanier is a professor of English and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project at Pennsylvania State University. This long-term effort will result in the publication of a comprehensive scholarly edition of the writer’s some 6,000 letters in more than a dozen volumes by Cambridge University Press. Spanier teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, with a particular interest in modernism and expatriate writers between the World Wars. She has served as consultant to several documentary films about Hemingway, including the PBS American Masters Series. She is also the co-editor (with David Morrell) of American Fiction, American Myth (2000)- a collection of essays by Penn State Evan Pugh Professor Philip Young, one of the earliest and most influential Hemingway scholars and her doctoral mentor.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a solid critical study of much of Kay Boyle's body of work within the context of her life.
That body of work comprised of 40 books:
14 novels
eight volumes of poetry
11 collections of short fiction
three children's books
French to English translations and essays.
Kay Boyle was the recipient of the O. Henry award twice. And her novella Crazy Hunter is described as "near perfection".
Kay Boyle was an expatriate American in Europe for much of her adult life, and during the 1950s was a target of McCarthyism.
Today, few know her name despite her stature as one of the great fictional writers. In many ways, Boyle shares the stage with another female writer who deserves more respect and more admiration, Martha Gellhorn.
Yet, Boyle's friends included James Joyce, Archibald MacLeish, Katherine Anne Porter and many other literary luminaries dating back to the 1920s.
In contemporary times, Kay Boyle has the admiration of a Canadian writer of international repute..Margaret Atwood.

"Margaret Atwood has said that Kay Boyle's work approaches "the moment of visionary realism when sensation heightens and time for an instant fixes and stops." While her writing has sometimes been spoken of as nearly surreal, Atwood feels that if one were to pick a painter whose work corresponds to Boyle's, it would not be Salvador Dali: "One thinks rather of Brueghel, a landscape clearly and vividly rendered, everything in its ordinary order, while Icarus falls to his death, scarcely noticed, off to the side."
--"Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist"
Kay Boyle...writer, activist for a better world, and educator deserves our attention......
My hope is that I'll be able to place Joan Mellen's biography "Kay Boyle: Author of Herself" on a stack of "to read books", soon.......

[Bridget · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Kay Boyle led an interesting life, Spanier chooses to focus primarily on Boyle's works giving the impression that it was her work that defined her. Spanier merely glazes over Boyle's relationships with her eight children, when she was brought before McCarthy as she was accused of communism, and devotes only one short chapter to her political activism in the 1960's. The autobiographical nature of Boyle's fiction may lead one to assume they are connecting with her reality by analyzing her texts, but I believe this to be Spanier's greatest misstep. She spends so much time recounting every plot line of Boyle's enormous canon, it leaves something to be desired regarding Boyle's real life.