A long, detailed biography revealing Boyle's extreme arrogance, unending work (8 hours a day writing for 80 years), excessive procreation, man-chasing passion, late-blooming political awareness spawned by a '50s witch-hunt, and, most importantly/tragically for her children, celebration of the unexamined inner life, all coupled with massive areas of political and economic ignorance. This mix lead to wild success, failure, and finally semi-critical rediscovery, all told in this personal history of the 20th Century starting with expat modernism, and then skipping thru Harold Ross NewYorkerism, fascism, McCarthyism, hippie communalism, black power, feminism (the ony one she spurned), and finally peace activism.

Note: Mellon writes with god-like authority on all matters moral and literary. Beware if you have other ideas about Boyle. ( )

Although I firmly believe that unpleasant people can create great art and that we should try to judge art for itself and not for the artist's personal life, I admit to being disappointed by the huge gap between Kay Boyle as a person (especially as a mother) and as the writer who created some of my favorite work of the 1930s. In this exhaustive and exhausting biography, Joan Mellen portrays a woman who is haughty, manipulative, judgmental, didactic, and anti-intellectual, from her early years right up until her death at the age of 90. Simultaneously believing that a woman's role is to bear children and that she should follow her own desires regardless of those children's best interests, Boyle had five daughters and one son whose lives she proceeded to ruin at the altar of her own self-regard. Her daughter Faith, from whom Boyle had been estranged for 20 years, describes their eventual reconciliation as an uneasy one, referring to an evil quality that Boyle possessed even in old age. Ironically, Faith was the daughter who Boyle felt closest to, and whose involvement in Mel Lyman's dogmatic commune/cult devastated Boyle. As an autocrat herself, she perhaps resented the autocratic hold that Lyman had over Faith, a hold that she wielded over her other children. To make matters worse, Boyle's writing deteriorated in the 1940s and onward, as wartime privations forced her to churn out potboilers for the mass media to make ends meet. By the time she had been investigated for McCarthyism in the 1950s, her talent seemed to have utterly left her, and she spent the '60s and '70s writing leftist political screeds and mawkish homages to those of her students who lived up to her radical ideology. The last 200 or so pages of the book become a mire of repetitive snippets (Boyle protests social injustice; Boyle suffers some physical ailment that she gamely pulls through, swearing that age won't get the best of her; Boyle rewrites her diaries to self-mythologize; Boyle threatens to sue anyone who dares to question her version of history; Boyle plays her children against each other and behaves nastily to her grandchildren, etc.). By the time she dies, it comes as a relief to the reader, although the ensuing description of the revisionary eulogies read at her funeral ends the book on a discomfiting note. To her credit, Boyle does come across as a survivor, and she certainly did act on her political convictions, misguided though some of them may have been. Still, the reader is left with the image of a bullying woman who never hesitated to push her views on others, even harassing the residents in her retirement facility to join Amnesty International. Boyle's literary legacy is similarly besmirched by the decades of prodigious yet slack writing that threaten to undermine the truly innovative work that she did in the 1930s. ( )