Quotessence
Home / Authors / Kay Boyle Biography
Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle Biography

Writer

Related Quotes

“Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....”

Southern CultureFaulknerCaldwellImbecilese
Book:Being geniuses together, 1920-1930
Create image

“Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956): Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict.”

FreedomWritersNational SecurityMccarthyismDylan Thomas
Book:Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays, 1927-1984
Create image