num_pages: 472
description: Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County , Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson's book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.
language: English
title: Memoirs of Hecate County
titlecomplete: Memoirs of Hecate County
genres: Classics, Banned Books, New York, Fiction, Short Stories, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, Sexuality, American
ratings_count: 263
publisher: NYRB Classics