Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, Korb discusses how the personalities of the main characters are reflected through Boyle's choice of descriptive language.

In the early 1930s, Kay Boyle was producing short stories at an astonishing rate. Over the course of that decade she published three short story collections in addition to numerous other works. Despite her prodigious writing, she rarely talked about her work. "Black Boy," first published in 1932 and collected in First Lover and Other Stories the following year, was one of the few stories that she spoke about to friends, chronicling the difficulties she had getting it published. Several magazines rejected it, including Harper's, which nonetheless told her that some of its passages were "magical." Boyle finally succeeded in selling the story to the New...