During the 1920's, Glenway Wescott … was generally considered by critics and discriminating readers as one of America's most promising young writers. (p. 3)

In certain ways Wescott is [indeed] of his time and place and in the mainstream of American literature. His beginnings as an imagist poet, his early appearance as a critic-reviewer in the pages of The New Republic, Poetry, The Dial, and other little magazines, his themes and his experiments with form in his novels and short stories which appeared before he had turned thirty, his years as an expatriate—all have their parallels to the production and careers of other American writers of the twenties. Contemporary criticism, although appreciative and optimistic about his career, was with few exceptions brief and ephemeral, predominately placing him as a regionalist, a chronicler of pioneers, a recorder of frustrated and rebellious lives wasted away in remote middle-western towns….

Despite the...