Process A NOVEL Author:Kay Boyle Process is the first novel written by Kay Boyle, one of the most enduring writers of modernist American literature. Written in 1924 and 1925, when Boyle was a young American living in France, Process was circulating among potential publishers when the manuscript disappeared. Three-quarters of a century later, Sandra Spanier, preeminent authority... more » on Boyle, discovered a carbon copy of it while preparing an edition of Boyle's letters. Set off by Spanier's substantial introduction, it is published here for the first time. Process is a classic Bildungsroman and "a portrait of the artist as a young woman." Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Kerith Day is a sensitive youth, self-consciously in search of her own identity and place in the world. Observing with a keen and critical eye the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better. She sets off for France, where workers and radicals are on the same side, and places her faith in art and politics. This lyrical first novel captures the passionate indignation and urgency to independence that propelled the young Kay Boyle toward radical politics and literary experimentation. Part of the legendary circle of expatriate writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s, Boyle published some of her early poetry and fiction in the avant-garde little magazines, alongside the work of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. After the appearance of Boyle's first published novel in 1931, Katherine Anne Porter signaled her as one of the "most portentous" talents of her generation. Like other cutting-edge work of its time, Process pushes the envelope of genre, blurring the boundary between fiction and poetry. Spanier calls this long-lost first novel the purest, most sustained example we have of Boyle's high modernist work. Its recovery marks a significant addition to the body of early twentieth-century American literature. As a political novel that predates the radical literature of the 1930s, as a novel of development written by an American woman, and as a startlingly innovative experiment, Process is a pivotal text for reassessing literary modernism.« less