A short life of the author
Glenway Wescott (11 April 1901 – 22 February 1987) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose early career produced fiction of extraordinary grace and intelligence — particularly The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), a novella widely considered a minor masterpiece of American modernism — but whose creative output declined sharply after the early 1940s, leaving him as one of the most tantalising half-careers in American letters. His prose style — lapidary, reflective, exquisitely controlled — influenced writers as different as Truman Capote and Michael Cunningham.
Life
Wescott was born in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, the eldest of six children in a farm family. He was unhappy in rural life, recognising his homosexuality early, and left for the University of Chicago at seventeen. He did not finish his degree but published his first poetry and joined the literary circle around Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine.
In the 1920s he moved to Paris, joining the expatriate community alongside Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Ford Madox Ford. His relationship with Hemingway was famously difficult; Hemingway mocked him in The Sun Also Rises (as Robert Prentiss) and Green Hills of Africa, dismissing his prose as precious. The mockery wounded Wescott and may have contributed to the creative inhibition that afflicted his later career.
In 1934, Wescott settled at Haymeadows, a farm in New Jersey, with his lifelong partner Monroe Wheeler (a publisher and later director of publications at the Museum of Modern Art) and the photographer George Platt Lynes. The three lived together in an arrangement that was unusual even by the standards of their bohemian milieu. Wescott became a figure in New York literary society — urbane, charming, and increasingly unproductive.
The Grandmothers (1927)
Wescott’s first major novel won the Harper Prize and established his reputation. It is a multi-generational family chronicle set in Wisconsin, structured as a young expatriate’s meditation on his ancestors. The novel is distinguished by its prose — measured, evocative, faintly elegiac — and by its treatment of the Midwest as a landscape of spiritual deprivation from which escape is both necessary and guilt-inducing.
The Pilgrim Hawk (1940)
Wescott’s masterpiece — and one of the great short novels of the twentieth century — is set in a single afternoon at a house outside Paris. The narrator, an American expatriate named Alwyn Tower, observes the visit of an Irish couple, the Cullens, who arrive with a hooded hawk on the wife’s wrist. The hawk becomes a vehicle for the narrator’s reflections on love, jealousy, hunger, freedom, art, and the relationship between wildness and domestication.
The novella’s method is oblique and cumulative: nothing happens (a hawk is fed, a husband gets drunk, a gun is briefly waved) but everything is at stake. The narrator’s consciousness — watchful, self-doubting, luxuriously intelligent — is the real subject. Katherine Anne Porter called it “a fine piece of writing”; Michael Cunningham later championed it as a neglected masterpiece.
Later Work
Apartment in Athens (1945) — a wartime novel about a Greek family forced to billet a German officer — was commercially successful but artistically conventional. After it, Wescott published almost no fiction for the remaining four decades of his life. He wrote literary essays — collected in Images of Truth (1962), shrewd assessments of writers including Thomas Mann, Colette, and Katherine Anne Porter — and kept extensive journals, but the novels he planned never materialised.
The reasons for his long silence have been much debated: Hemingway’s mockery, the distractions of social life, the difficulty of writing openly about homosexuality, perfectionism, or simply the exhaustion of his particular gift. His journals — published posthumously — reveal a man painfully aware of his failure to produce.
Critical Standing
Wescott is now remembered almost exclusively for The Pilgrim Hawk, which remains in print and is regularly anthologised. It is taught in creative writing programmes as a model of the compressed novel and the intelligence of indirect narration. His other work is largely out of print. The posthumous publication of his journals and letters has added biographical interest but has not significantly expanded his literary reputation.
Collecting Wescott
The Pilgrim Hawk (1940, Harper & Brothers) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$300. The Grandmothers (1927, Harper) in first edition brings $50–$150. Association copies — particularly those inscribed to Monroe Wheeler or George Platt Lynes — are prized.