Memoirs of Hecate County was published by Doubleday in 1946 and immediately became the most controversial book of the year — not for its literary qualities but for its sexual content. The story “The Princess with the Golden Hair” contains explicit descriptions of sexual encounters that, while mild by contemporary standards, were enough to get the book prosecuted for obscenity. New York State banned the book in 1946; the ban was upheld by the US Supreme Court in a 4-4 split decision (Justice Frankfurter recused himself because he was Wilson’s friend). Doubleday withdrew the book, and it was not republished in America until 1959, when changing standards made the prosecution seem absurd.
The obscenity controversy obscured what the book actually was: a sophisticated cycle of stories about American class, money, sex, and self-deception. “Hecate County” is a version of Westchester County, the wealthy suburban belt north of New York City, and the narrator is a cultural critic — obviously a version of Wilson himself — who observes the lives of his neighbors with the detachment and occasional cruelty that writers bring to the people around them.
The best story, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” follows the narrator’s simultaneous affairs with two women: a beautiful, cold society woman and a warm, vital working-class woman. The contrast is meant to expose the narrator’s own class prejudices and emotional dishonesty — he wants the body of one woman and the social status of the other, and he gets neither satisfactorily. The sexual explicitness is essential to the story’s point: the narrator’s failure to connect physically with the society woman is inseparable from his failure to connect with her emotionally and socially.
The other stories vary in quality but share the cycle’s central preoccupation: the corruption of American cultural life by money and pretension. “Ellen Terhune,” about a pianist who loses her talent, is a study of artistic failure. “The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul” is a satirical portrait of a wealthy family’s philanthropy gone wrong. “Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home” is perhaps the darkest piece, a portrait of a marriage consumed by mutual contempt.
Wilson’s fiction lacks the warmth and humor of his criticism — the narrator is cold, judgmental, and not entirely sympathetic — but the prose is beautiful and the observation is merciless. The book anticipates the suburban fiction of Cheever, Updike, and Richard Yates by a decade, and its treatment of sex as a social and psychological fact (rather than a romantic fantasy) was genuinely ahead of its time.
Collecting Memoirs of Hecate County
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1946): Black cloth, dust jacket. Withdrawn after obscenity prosecution.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- 1959 L.C. Page reissue: $15–$30
- Later paperback editions: $5–$10
The Doubleday first edition, withdrawn from sale, is the scarce and desirable state. Copies that survived the ban in good condition are increasingly difficult to find.