However much we flatter ourselves to the contrary, the vast majority of Americans are the spiritual heirs not of Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson but of John Calvin, and no contemporary writer is better aware of this fact than Evan S. Connell. In his great novel Mrs. Bridge (1959) and its sequel, Mr. Bridge (1969), he provided a brilliant and indeed peerless portrayal of upper-middle-class life in the buttoned-down, white-bread American Midwest. Mrs. Bridge herself, a Kansas City matron, is one of the most haunting characters in modern fiction. Innocent, passive, slightly ill at ease even in her own protected environment of home and country club, she is stupefyingly naïve, surprised and vaguely threatened by the occasional intimations she gets of a wider world which is indifferent to her own conservative Protestant values. It is easy to laugh at her, but such laughter is disturbing, for she is a widely recognizable American type, easily visible in our mothers, our grandmothers, perhaps even ourselves.

Aside from the Bridge books and his study of Custer, Son of the Morning Star (1984), Connell’s work has not been widely popular but has appealed rather to a small group of aficionados. His books include The Diary of a Rapist (1966); The Connoisseur (1974) and Double Honeymoon (1976), both featuring Karl Muhlbach, a widowed suburban insurance executive and father; two free-verse books, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963) and Points for a Compass Rose (1973); and a fictionalized biography