by Edmund Wilson • Introduction by Louis Menand

A powerful novel, Memoirs of Hecate County has been overlooked, perhaps because of Edmund Wilson's commanding reputation as a critic, but also no doubt because its unsentimental depictions of sex attracted the attentions of the censor and provoked a scandal. Hecate County is a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and fantasies of sexual fulfillment take form or fade away in an atmosphere of persistent unreality. But at the heart of Wilson's book is a New York story, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," a riveting, comic, and ultimately very moving account of man caught up in concurrent love affairs. "No longer shocking, and never meant to be, this 'memoir' remains, I think, a work of exemplary merit, still the most intelligent attempt by an American male to dramatize sexual behavior as a function of, rather than a suspension of, personality."—John Updike
PB • 5" x 8" • 472 pp

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One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods upon me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. So begins Letty Fox's own story, a comic extravaganza about the crazy circus of her early life and the seemingly unending search for a lasting relationship.

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Harvey Swados pays tribute to the concerns of ordinary people here in a naturalistic and controlled style that bears comparison to Cheever and Bellow. In these portraits of America at mid-century, a professor's wife loses her connection to her husband but rediscovers herself; a boy who idolizes his Coney Island uncle learns that human fallibility is everyone's lot; and in the celebrated title novella, post-World-War-II New York plays host to a generation of idealists who must come to terms with a country increasingly divided against itself.

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Norman Moonbloom's brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds, Moonbloom confronts a wild assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young writer modeled on James Baldwin. He finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives. This comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.

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