The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait Book

Glenway Wescott's poignant novel of nineteenth-century Wisconsin was first published in 1927 as the winner of the prestigious Harper Prize. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Wescott left the Midwest behind to live as a writer in 1920s Paris. In The Grandmothers, based on Wescott's own life and family, the young Alwyn Tower leaves Wisconsin to travel in Europe, but finds himself haunted by a family of long-dead spirits - his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, a generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the Civil War. Their images were preserved in fading family albums of daguerreotypes and in his own fragmented memories of stories told to him by his strong and enduring grandmothers. To disinter and finally lay to rest the family secrets that lingered insistently in his mind, Wescott writes, Alwyn was "obliged to live in imagination many lives already at an end."

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A re-issue of Wescott's (1901-87) novel about the rural midwest, which garnered the Harper Prize when it was first published in 1927. It was also reprinted in 1950 and 1962, but here includes an introduction by Sargent Bush (English, U. of Wisconsin- Madison). Wescott was born and raised in Wisconsin where the novel is set, but wrote it in France where he was hanging out in Paris with the inter-war expatriot crowd. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)