SOURCE: "Re-discovery: Wescott's Good-bye, Wisconsin" in The Southern Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, July, 1970, pp. 674-81.

In the following essay, noted American author Wallace Stegner comments on the critical reception of Good-bye, Wisconsin and offers his own evaluation of the stories, claiming "Wescott's farewell to the climate, landscape, and state of mind of the Midwest is a book that deserves not to be lost. "

When Goodbye Wisconsin appeared in 1928, Glenway Wescott was twenty-seven years old and already a prodigy. He had published his first volume of poems, The Bitterns, at nineteen; his first novel, The Apple of the Eye, at twenty-three. The year before the publication of Goodbye Wisconsin, his novel The Grandmothers had won him the Harper Prize, many readers, and universal critical praise, and had established him as a major name among the gifted and aggrieved who were turning the twenties into an American renaissance. Now these...