Kay Boyle

Chronicler of our times, and one of the premier writers of the modern short story, Kay Boyle has been both popularly and critically acclaimed for most of this century. Winner of the O. Henry Memorial Award and recipient of AMA Guggenheim fellowships, she is perhaps best known for works like The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels (1940) and The Smoking Mountain: Story of Postwar Germany (1951). Her writing focuses on the human aspects behind great political movements; she uses firsthand knowledge of major events in this century to give her tales an agreeable freshness and authority. Elizabeth S. Bell has traced the many developments in Boyle's innovative style, her shifting concerns with national and international political issues, and her dexterous use of personal experience. The relationship between the author and her peers in modern fiction receives careful examination, as do her many contributions to the genre. Bell's personal contact with Boyle has led to a remarkably perceptive study, which includes a previously unpublished interview with the author and excerpts from other unpublished works. Well-chosen selections from the comments of various critics provide many different vantage points from which to study Boyle. Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction is one of the few book-length studies of the writer.