Kay Boyle , poet, short-story writer, novelist, journalist, and teacher, has been known to the American reading public since 1929, when her first collection of short stories was published. One of the expatriates during the 1920s and 1930s, Boyle in her early work provides a significant comment on that important American literary movement. Today she is best known as a political activist, having vigorously championed integration, civil rights, the ban of nuclear weapons, and America's withdrawal from Vietnam. Actually her liberal activism is long-lived. The author of numerous and often brilliant short stories (she received O. Henry Memorial Short Story prizes in 1935 and 1941), she is also a poet of stature. Since the publication of the novel Plagued by the Nightingale in 1931, novels by her have appeared frequently--fourteen in all.

Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 19 February 1902, Kay Boyle , when six months old, moved with her well-to-do family to Philadelphia. Never...