Glenway Wescott

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Glenway Wescott (born April 11, 1901 in Kewaskum , Wisconsin , † February 22, 1987 in Rosemont , New Jersey ) was a homosexual American writer whose importance has been compared to that of EM Forster in England. Susan Sontag has called his book The Pilgrim Hawk an "important American novel".

Life

Wescott was born in 1901 on a farm in Kewaskum, Wisconsin. From 1917 to 1919 he attended the University of Chicago and became a member of the University's Poetry Club , alongside Elizabeth Madox Roberts , Arthur Yvor Winters and Maurice Leeseman . Encouraged by Winters, he wrote poems in the imaginistic style. His first publication, poems printed by Monroe Wheeler in the chapbook The Bitterns (1920), dedicated to Yvor Winters, received praise from Wallace Stevens. Monroe Wheeler (1899–1988), whom he met in 1919 and whose partner he remained until his death, helped him accept his homosexuality.

His novel The Grandmothers (1927) received a literary award and became a bestseller. A serious illness in late 1918, the Spanish flu , according to his biographer Jerry Roscoe , ended his studies. He was then in New Mexico, in 1921, in Germany in 1922, returned to the United States, but visited Europe again and again. From the mid-1920s Wescott lived with Wheeler mainly in France, where he met Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Ford Maddox Ford and was in the Gertrude Steins district . In 1933 he and Wheeler, who became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art , returned to New York. They lived there with their boyfriend, the young photographer George Platt Lynes . Wheeler and Wescott moved to his younger brother Lloyd's newly acquired farm in a small town near Hampton , New Jersey , in 1936 . Lloyd had married the wealthy Barbara Harrison in Paris.

His novel The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (1940) was praised by literary critics and the book Apartment in Athens (1945) was about a Greek family in Athens, occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War II, where a German officer was billeted a success. It was his last completed novel. In 1962 a volume was published with essays on his friends Katherine Anne Porter , Somerset Maugham and Thornton Wilder as well as on Colette , Isak Dinesen and Thomas Mann , whom he also knew. Since 1947 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Glenway Wescott was the model for Robert Prentiss in the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway , who envied Wescott's success and despised his homosexuality. Wescott and Monroe Wheeler are portrayed by Edmund White in The Farewell Symphony .

bibliography

  • The bitterns . 1920. 12 poems, 24 p. Monroe Wheeler ( chapbook ).
  • The Apple of the Eye . 1924. Novel.
  • Natives of Rock. XX Poems 1921-1922 . Francesco Bianco, New York 1925. 20 poems. Illustrations: Pamela Bianco.
  • Like a lover . Monroe Wheeler, Villefrance-sur-Mer 1926. Prose.
  • The grandmothers . Harper & Brothers, New York 1927. Novel. German Translation: The Towers. A family novel . FG Speidelsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Vienna 1928. Translator: Georg Terramare
  • Good-bye, Wisconsin . Harper & Brothers, New York 1928. The title elessay and 10 short stories.
  • The Babe's Bed . Harrison of Paris, Paris 1930. Printed by Enschede in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
  • A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers . Harrison of Paris, Paris 1932. With illustrations by Pavel Tchelichev.
  • The Pilgrim Hawk. A Love Story , 1940. German: The peregrine falcon . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1952.
  • Apartment in Athens. Harper & Brothers, New York 1945. Ger .: Apartment in Athens . Parthas, Berlin 2006.
  • Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism . Harper & Row, New York 1962.
  • A Visit to Priapus (short story, online version )

literature

  • When We Were Three. The Travel Albums of Georges Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott 1925-35 , with texts by Anatole Pohorilenko and James Crump. Arena, New York 1988.
  • David Leddick: Intimate Companions. A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, And Their Circle . St. Martin's Press 2001.
  • Jerry Rosco: Glenway Wescott Personally. A biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2002 (2014 Lambda Literary Award winner in the Gay Memoir / Biography category ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Glenway Wescott. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 2, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Wescott, Glenway
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Kewaskum , Wisconsin
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1987
Place of death Rosemont , New Jersey