KEOGH, THEODORA. Meg. Creative Age Press 1950, pbr Signet 1952, 1956. Sublimated lesbianism in a very young girl.
The Double Door. Creative Age 1950, pbr Signet 1952, (m).
KESSEL, JOSEPH. The Lion. (trans. from French by Peter Green). N. Y. Knopf 1959. One editor saw subtle variant emotion in the mother’s attachment to a school friend.
KING, DON. The Bitter Love. Newsstand Library Magenta Book, 1959. Rather good evening waster about a supposed double murder, gradually solved by the slow revelation of the affair between Brenda and her 16 year old stepdaughter.
KING, MARY JACKSON. The Vine of Glory. Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. This won a prize as the best novel on race relations by a Southern writer for its year. A repressed, inhibited, small-town girl, Lavinia, at the mercy of elderly tyrannical relatives, forms a close friendship with a Negro man who was her only childhood friend. The friendship between Lavinia and Augustus is purely platonic; she attends a school he has set up for colored girls who wish to improve themselves, and he helps to find her a job; but enraged small-minded bigots bring on a lynching. Early in the book a preparation is laid for Lavinia’s lack of friends of her own sex and status by her unfortunate friendship with Dixie Murdoch, teen-age daughter of a Holy-roller preacher. While spending the night, Dixie attempts to make homosexual advances to the younger girl, and Lavinia becomes hysterical. The episode is brief, condemnatory and very realistic.
KIN, DAVID GEORGE. Women Without Men. Brookwood, 1958. The author calls this “True stories of lesbian life in Greenwich Village”. It represents a roundup of a dozen or so famous literary and artistic figures, presented as case histories. They are presented, picture after sordid picture, without a glimmer of understanding or real insight, though he sometimes shows smug sympathy for a few he claims to have reformed by something he calls “cultural therapy”. He baldly states in the preface; “I take my mental hygiene from Moses, rather than Freud, and have the Mosaic horror of homosexuality”. Despite this vicious slanting, the book is explicit, funny in places, and presumably verifiable—but certainly makes homosexuality look like a Fate Worse Than Death. The writing is straight from the tabloid newspapers.
KINSEY, CHET. Kate. pbo, Beacon 1959. scv.
KOESTLER, ARTHUR. Arrival and Departure. Macmillan 1943. A man makes the most important decision of his life on the rebound of disillusion after discovering that a woman who risked her life to save him is a lesbian.
+ KRAMER, N. MARTIN (pseud. of Beatrice Ann Wright). Hearth and The Strangeness. Macmillan 1956, pbr Pyramid 1957. An excellent novel of the fear of inherited insanity in a family. The youngest child, Aliciane, becomes a lesbian; this is one of the few realistic and unromanticized portraits of the factors in the development of homosexuality from childhood.