As a member of the expatriate literary community in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, Kay Boyle was well known for her novels, poetry, and short fiction, but it is as a short-story writer that she excelled. During the entire decade of the 1930s her work appeared consistently on lists of the year's best short stories and won two major short-fiction awards. Noted as a stylist and as an architect of words, she received the accolades of peers and readers alike.

Boyle was born to Howard P. and Katherine Evans Boyle in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 19 February 1902. In her own biographical sketches Boyle places her date of birth as 19 February 1903, but the fact that she was actually born one year earlier has come to light in recent years. Named Katherine for her mother, the child grew up in affluence. She traveled extensively in Europe during her early...