Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 - February 22, 1987) was a major American novelist during the 1920-1940 period and a figure in the American expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s. Wescott was gayEric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity, Cambridge University Press, 2003, page 175. His relationship with longtime companion Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott's death.

Biography

Wescott was born on a farm in Kewaskum, Wisconsin in 1901. His younger brother, Lloyd Wescott, was born in Wisconsin in 1907. He studied at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of a literary circle including Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Yvor Winters, and Janet Lewis. Independently wealthy, he began his writing career as a poet, but is best known for his short stories and novels, notably The Grandmothers (1926). He lived in Germany (1921–22), and in France (c.1925–33), where he mixed with Gertrude Stein and other members of the American expatriate community;Wescott was the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Wescott and Wheeler returned to the United States and maintained an apartment in Manhattan with photographer George Platt Lynes. When his brother Lloyd moved to a dairy farm in Union Township near Clinton in Hunterdon County, New Jersey in 1936, Wescott along with Wheeler and Lynes took over one of the farmhand houses and called it Stone-Blossom.

His novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (1940), was praised by the critics. Apartment in Athens (1945), the story of a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, was a popular success. From then on he ceased to write fiction, although he published essays and edited the works of others.

In 1959, when his brother Lloyd acquired a farm near the village of Rosemont in Delaware Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Wescott moved into a two-story stone house on the property, dubbed Haymeadows. In 1987 Wescott died of a stroke at his home in Rosemont.

References

Further reading

• Rosco, Jerry (2002) Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Phelps, Robert, with Jerry Rosco (1990) Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937-1955. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
• Diamond, Daniel (2008) Delicious: A Memoir of Glenway Wescott. Toronto: Sykes Press.

External links

• A Visit to Priapus, the only explicitly gay short story by Wescott (1938), has been reprinted with permission in the gay literary journal Ganymede, #3 issue (April 2009)
• Review of Jerry Rosco's biography and overview of Wescott's work
• The Loves of the Falcon Edmund White essay on Wescott and a review of books by and about him, from The New York Review of Books