Wescott, Glenway

Wescott, Glenway (1901–87), Wisconsin author, known for his writings about his native region, although he had lived mainly abroad. After publishing The Bitterns (1920), poems, he wrote The Apple of the Eye (1924), a novel of the frontier West about a boy torn between the crabbed orthodoxy of his aunt, a typical pioneer woman, and the pagan acceptance of the beauty of life taught him by a friend. After Natives of Rock (1925), a volume of poems, and Like a Lover (1926), short stories, he wrote his best‐known work, The Grandmothers (1927), published in England as A Family Portrait. This is the story of a pioneer Midwestern family told through the imagination of a youth, Alwyn Tower, who, having escaped to Europe from his uncongenial background, nostalgically turns the pages of a photograph album and from the faces of his ancestors reconstructs their sad, frustrated lives. Good‐Bye, Wisconsin (1928) is a collection of short stories presenting the same dour interpretation of the Midwest. The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), his first work of fiction in ten years, is set in a Paris suburb during the 1920s and concerns three couples, linked by three different kinds of love. Images of Truth (1962) is a collection of essays about literary friends, subtitled “Remembrances and Criticism.” The Best of All Possible Worlds (1975) contains letters and reminiscences from 1914 to 1937.