James Boyd, a paradoxical figure who preferred fox hunting to writing novels, and whose aristocratic life-style belied his fervent dedication to democratic ideals, seems to be in danger of being undeservedly forgotten. During his lifetime, Boyd had five novels, about a score each of short stories, poems, and essays, and a few short plays published, and in the years preceding his death, he revitalized and edited the Southern Pines Pilot, a weekly newspaper he bought in 1941. This relatively small literary output nonetheless made Boyd a well-known and respected figure on the American literary scene in those times. In a 27 April 1935 Saturday Review of Literature essay, Bernard De Voto compared Thomas Wolfe's abilities unfavorably to James Boyd's. Maxwell Perkins considered Boyd one of the young writers at Scribners for whom he had "great hopes" and wrote to him in 1924: "We know what the old authors can do and, although...