Summary

Chapter 1 begins with the narrator, Grady Tripp, talking about the first writer he ever knew: a man named Albert Vetch. Vetch wrote horror stories under the name August Van Zorn, and he lived in the McClelland Hotel in Pennsylvania. Grady, an orphan, lived with his grandmother when he was a child; his grandmother owned and operated the McClelland Hotel. Vetch wrote and sold short stories to pay for the cost of keeping his mentally infirm wife in an asylum. One day, Vetch’s wife killed herself, and Vetch killed himself shortly thereafter. Grady is now in his mid-forties and works as a creative writing teacher at an unnamed college in Pittsburgh. He has written multiple novels, at least one of which was highly acclaimed. However, he has had difficulty finishing his next novel, entitled Wonder Boys. The manuscript has reached over 2,000 pages, and he...