Like many other members of the famous Lost Generation of American writers who inhabited Paris in the 1920s, Kay Boyle was born to a middle-class family in the Midwest—in her case, to the Boyle family of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1902. Boyle's family was intellectually active and exposed her to avant-garde art early in her life—she even attended the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913. When she was twenty years old and living in New York, Boyle married a French exchange student, Richard Brault, and in 1923 moved to France with her new husband. By this time, Boyle was deeply involved in the avant-garde literary scene in New York, and while in France, she fell in with the American writers and publishers of Paris—especially Ernest Walsh, who edited This Quarter. By 1926, Boyle had left Brault and moved in with Walsh, whose...