Neith Boyce c. 1900
Southern California is the key to the life work of American woman writer Neith Boyce (1872-1951), daughter of Ruskin Art Club founder Mary E. Boyce. After a diphtheria epidemic killed her four siblings in Milwaukee in 1880, Neith and her parents migrated to Los Angeles and rebuilt their lives. She never forgot the freedom of being unschooled, reading as she pleased among her parents' many books, and riding horses on their ranch as she regained her health. Los Angeles in the 1880s is the setting for her first novel, The Forerunner (1903)—arguably her best. This talk will explore her connection to the area. Following literary success in New York and marriage to the radical journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1939), Neith was at the social center of a large circle of writers and artists including Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Djuna Barnes. She circulated in Provincetown, New York, Chicago, Key West, the Southwest, California, the South of France, Italy, and other haunts of the movers and shakers of early 20th-ce. modernist America. Currently Neith Boyce is known as the Ur-Mother of the Provincetown Players in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1915. Like her mother, Mary E. Boyce, Neith was a forerunner in setting taste and style for a community.
Carol DeBoer-Langworthy teaches narrative nonfiction in the Nonfiction Writing Program of Brown University's Department of English. She is the editor of The Modern World of Neith Boyce: Autobiography and Diaries (U. of New Mexico Press, 2003) and working on a literary biography of this Progressive-Era modernist writer. She has given lectures on Neith Boyce and the world of the Boyce family and early 20th-century Los Angeles to Ruskin Art Club audiences on several occasions. For more information consult https://www.neithboyce.net/index.htm.