Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography
As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York's artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn't finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.
In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott's long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott's private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.
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Jerry Rosco is a writer and editor and the coeditor of Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937-1955. He lives in New York City.
"[Rosco] sets forth clearly the public triumphs and private sufferings experienced during this long and interesting life. A biography of a 'minor' writer such as Wescott is always a labor of love and readers can only be grateful to Rosco for his curiosity and eloquence."--Edmund White, The New York Review of Books
"More than a biography of an unjustly ignored American writer, Rosco's work portrays a fascinating panorama of the evolution of America's gay artistic community."--Library Journal
"It is a distinct treat to recall my meetings with and listening in awe to Glenway Wescott, noted novelist, essayist, pundit, and bon vivant."--Liz Smith, syndicated columnist
"Wescott's life and career are important to American literature and to the history of changing sexual mores in America. [This book] should take its place alongside Carlos Baker's Ernest Hemingway, Mark Schorer's Sinclair Lewis, and Philip Herring's Djuna [Barnes] as the definitive treatment."--Sargent Bush, Jr., author of The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds
