The grandmothers
Subtitle: a family portrait
By: Glenway Wescott ; introduction by Sargent Bush, Jr.
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Madison
Language: eng
Number of pages: 388
Subjects: Americans -- Europe -- Fiction.; Young men -- Fiction.; Wisconsin -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction.; Europe -- Fiction.
Description: Glenway Wescott's poignant novel of nineteenth-century Wisconsin was first published in 1927 as the winner of the prestigious Harper Prize. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Wescott left the Midwest behind to live as a writer in 1920s Paris.

In The Grandmothers, based on Wescott's own life and family, the young Alwyn Tower leaves Wisconsin to travel in Europe, but finds himself haunted by a family of long-dead spirits - his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, a generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the Civil War. Their images were preserved in fading family albums of daguerreotypes and in his own fragmented memories of stories told to him by his strong and enduring grandmothers.

To disinter and finally lay to rest the family secrets that lingered insistently in his mind, Wescott writes, Alwyn was "obliged to live in imagination many lives already at an end."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. xix-xx).
"A North Coast book."