Kay Boyle's poetry is often relegated to a minor footnote in her distinguished literary career, for she is better known for her fiction, which includes fourteen novels and ten short story collections. Two of her stories, "The White Horses of Vienna" and "Defeat," were named O. Henry Memorial Award winners in 1935 and 1941. However, as she told a 1964 interviewer, "I started out as a poet and I wrote many, many volumes of poetry when I was a child." Her first published work was poetry. She adds that "William Carlos Williams who was one of my very dearest friends, got very angry if anyone called me a prose writer. He always referred to me as a poet, and he said that it was just by mistake I had written prose."

The daughter of Howard and Katherine Evans Boyle, Kay Boyle was born into an affluent family in St. Paul, Minnesota...