GLENWAY WESCOTT, was a Wisconsin author, born on this date (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  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.

Wescott lived in Germany from 1921 to1922, and in France c. 1925 to1933, where he mixed with Gertrude Stein and other members of the American expatriate community. Wescott was the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. After meeting Prentiss, Hemingway’s narrator, Jake Barnes, confesses, “I just thought perhaps I was going to throw up.” In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein wrote about him, “There was also Glenway Wescott, but Glenway Wescott at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup, but it does not pour.”

Wescott and Wheeler returned to the United States and maintained an apartment in Manhattan with photographer George Platt Lynes, whom they had met in France in 1926. When his brother Lloyd moved to a dairy farm in Union Township, near Clinton in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, in 1936, Wescott, along with Wheeler and Lynes, took over one of the farmhand houses and named it Stone-Blossom.

Lynes ended his relationship with Wescott and Wheeler in 1943 to be with his studio assistant, Jonathan Tichenor. Nevertheless, Wescott was at Lynes’ bedside when he died of lung cancer in December 1955.

His novel, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, was praised by the critics. Apartment in Athens, the story of a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, was a popular success. From then on he ceased to write fiction, although he published essays and edited the works of others. In her essay on The Pilgrim Hawk, Ingrid Norton writes, “After…Apartment in Athens, Wescott lived until 1987 without writing another novel. His journals were published posthumously as Continual Lessons) and the occasional article, yes, but no more fiction. The Midwest-born author seems to slide into the golden handcuffs of expatriate decadence: supported by the heiress his brother married, Barbara Harrison Wescott; surrounded by literate friends; and given to social drinking and letter-writing.

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 publication of these journals were a literary event. They provide one man’s record of who was who, and who slept with whom, during a good portion of the 20^th 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.