To most literate Americans these days, the name probably means nothing. To some, who haven’t read him but are aware of his reputation as an American expatriate writer contemporary with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, it may conjure up vague images of Paris, the Riviera, and the transatlantic literary scene entre deux guerres. To those select few that are acquainted with his best writings, however, the name of Glenway Wescott, who died on February 22 at the age of eighty-five, doubtless recalls a number of very fine things: sensitively drawn characters; a witty and perceptive eye for detail; a prose of wonderful, almost Flaubertian, control, elegance, and penetration; and, above all, a rare delicacy and honesty of feeling—but feeling that has been digested, disciplined, transfigured into art.

Like Fitzgerald (who was five years his senior) and Hemingway (two years), Wescott was a son of the Midwest—a Wisconsin farm boy, to be specific—who began publishing at a very young age. His twenties— which were almost congruent with the 1920s (he was born in 1901)—were extraordinarily productive. By the time he was thirty-one, Wescott had published two books of poetry, The Bitterns (1920) and Natives of Rock (1925); three novels, The Apple of the Eye (1924), The Grandmothers (1927), and The Babe’s Bed (1930); a collection of stories, Good-Bye, Wisconsin (1928); numerous book reviews (written in his very early twenties for Poetry, The New Republic, and The Dial); and two idiosyncratic books of