GLENWAY WESCOTT, Wisconsin author, born (d: 1987); A major American novelist during the 1920-1940 period and a figure in the American expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s Wescott was the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
His relationship with longtime companion Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott’s death. If you haven’t read Wescott’s The Grandmothers (1927) you are, quite simply, not really civilized. Not that there’s anything remotely gay about it. There isn’t. It’s simply a beautiful book, well worth discovering.
Despite his literary reputation, Wescott published relatively little, but he continued writing his entire life. Having known almost everyone who was anyone in the arts during the past seventy-five years, he kept careful journals of his observations. The eventual publication of these journals will be a literary event. They provide one man’s record of who was who, and who slept with whom, during a good portion of the 20th century. Perhaps they will also explain the meaning of a spectacular Paul Cadmus painting that hung in his house. In it, three men, clearly arranged in a triangle, are sitting on a picnic blanket. The men are the photographer George Platt Lynes, museum curator Monroe Wheeler and Wescott himself.