The Pilgrim Hawk

"Wescott...loved language so much he not only devoted himself to reading and writing but also to speaking well, and he's remembered as much for being a splendid conversationalist and lecturer as he is for his few indelible novels, masterful essays, and celebrated journals. Wescott is also cherished for his candor about his homosexuality in overtly homophobic times." --Booklist

"A classic...a little masterpiece of horror and pity, a tale that you will long remember." --Chicago Tribune

"Glenway Wescott was part of a Midwestern movement in American literature during the first decades of this century-the era of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. . . . [Wescott] remains an appealing and distinctive minor master." --The Washington Post Book World

"It begins, this great American novel, with the voice of recollection; that is the voice of uncertainty...It belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth--century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view."-- Susan Sontag, The New Yorker

"The product of an intensely individual mind. Its scene is the softly beautiful French countryside of the Seine-et-Oise; its principal characters are British and American; its time is the Nineteen Twenties; its action takes place in a single afternoon.... It is an examination of love: of its nature, its petty turbulence and graver captivity and recompense." --The New York Times