Nicholas Delbanco, though not yet forty years old, has produced one of the most extensive and interesting, if relatively unknown, series of novels of any writer of his generation. From a prodigy of a novelist whose early parables were dazzling in their language, Delbanco has matured into a writer of first-rate dramatic fiction. His most recent books, the chronicles of a southern Vermont upper-class family, have demonstrated his deep concern with the problems and feelings of family life, human character, history, and time, and have won him a serious and well-deserved following among his contemporaries.

Delbanco is a naturalized American, born in London in 1942. At the age of six, he immigrated to the United States with his parents, Kurt and Barbara Delbanco (of German-Jewish and Sephardic origins). He attended elementary school in Westchester County just outside New York City and graduated from the Fieldston School, a private high...