Bayley, Isabel, 1911-1993

Isabel Bayley was born Isabel Levin on January 14, 1911, in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a B. S. in 1931 and from the University of Pittsburgh with an M. A. in 1933. She married William Hewitt Bayley on October 17, 1940. During World War II, she served as First Lieutenant in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in Buffalo, N.Y. In 1946 and 1947, she completed the first compilation from the journal of Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell Helicopter, which Young revised and later published as The Bell Notes, a Journey from Physics to Metaphysics . Isabel Bayley met Katherine Anne Porter at the Kansas University Seminar, where Porter was teaching, in 1948. They became good friends, and Porter encouraged Bayley to write professionally. In 1953, Porter authorized Bayley to work on the marginalia in her personal library for possible publication, a project that was never completed. Bayley's published short story, "The Great White Owl," appeared in Accent in 1954. In 1974, Porter named Bayley trustee of her literary estate; she actively assumed this position in 1983. Bayley selected and edited the Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, published on May 15, 1990, by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Isabel Bayley died at her home in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, Canada, on July 17, 1993.

Epithet: literary trustee of the estate of Katherine Anne Porter