SOURCE: "Glenway Wescott's Variations on the Waste Land Image," in The Twenties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French, Everett/Edwards, 1975, pp. 171-79.

In the following excerpt, Kahn identifies elements of the wasteland tradition in Wescott's collection Good-bye, Wisconsin, centering on the theme of disillusionment in the stories.

In Wescott's work of the 1920s fictive narrator and author are never far removed from each other—persona is almost person, fiction almost biography, or discovered biography. One has the impression that the past is not simply recalled for its record of things past but imaginatively evoked for the purpose of exploration and definition, that the work itself is the definition. The setting for all of Wescott's work of this period is Wisconsin, but that is simply the stage, not the substance, of these works. Indeed, the region is richly evoked in a highly distinctive lyrical and imagistic prose, and...