Evan S. Connell | via

Even though Evan S. Connell, who died early last year, lived much of his adult life in the West, it is much more significant that he was born in Kansas City, Missouri. That is where he set his two indisputably great novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969). From reading them, we feel we know the place well. There is Mission Hills, the country-club community where Walter and India Bridge make their home. The Aztec Room, where their truculent daughter Ruth announces that she will be the first of their children to leave the nest. The Terrace Grill at the Muehlebach Hotel, where Walter turns his nose up at his friends’ off-color jokes. It is a Kansas City twister that nearly swoops up Walter and India as they dine and it is Kansas City snootiness that is behind their astonished reaction to the news that their other daughter, Carolyn, is engaged to marry the son of a plumber from the neighboring town of Parallel. I do not mean to take away from Connell’s multifarious later works—which, besides the charming novels The Connoisseur and Double Honeymoon, include biography (Son of the Morning Star), essays (A Long Desire), and poetry (Points for a Compass Rose)—but as Brooke Allen wrote in these pages, despite the author’s egress from the American Middle West, “you can’t take Kansas City out of the boy.”