Alfred Chester was never a widely read or popular author in his lifetime, unless you count the readership of his short-lived column in Book Week (1963-1964), the Sunday book supplement of the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune. He belonged to a coterie of avant-garde writers who produced small-scale, quirky, but exacting works that appealed to discriminating readers. During Chester's life it was still economically possible, as it is no longer, for major publishers to issue such work, with its limited audience.

If he had lived, with his sanity restored, it is by no means certain, in light of his ambitions, that he would not have reached for a wider readership. But the last years of his life were marked by mental deterioration and diminished literary production; by the time of his death in 1971, he was almost entirely forgotten. His work remained out of print until the publication of...