Glenway Wescott

Glenway Wescott born 11 April 1901 (d. 1987)

Born on a farm in Wisconsin, Glenway Wescott has become rather overlooked as a novelist. He produced a series of best-selling, highly regarded novels, notably The Grandmothers (1927), The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment In Athens (1945), although he didn't complete a novel after the age of forty-five. He was equally well known as an arts impressario and for the company he kept.

Wescott is a linking figure at the heart of the American literary scene in the middle of the 20th century. As a young writer in 1920s Paris, he associated with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On his return to the States he was a central figure in New York's artistic and gay communities - W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Jean Cocteau, Ford Madox Ford, Thornton Wilder, and many others were among his acquaintance.

Although only some of his work hints at his sexuality, he wrote a private journal from 1937 until the 1950s, focusing on his private life and relationships with fellow gay artists including lifelong partner Monroe Wheeler, photographer George Platt Lynes and Paul Cadmus - this was published in 1990 as Continual Lessons. His relationship with Monroe Wheeler lasted from 1919 until Wescott's death. [Photograph of Glenway Wescott by George Platt Lynes]

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was elected as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; he also assisted Dr Alfred Kinsey with his ground-breaking research into human sexuality and published a collection of critical essays on writer friends he admired, called Images of Truth (1962).

A recent biography by Jerry Rosco has brought about a fresh appraisal of Wescott's work and his central role in American literature, and his best works have begun to be republished.

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood born 26 August 1904 (d. 1986)

Christopher Isherwood (born Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood) was an Anglo-American novelist. The son of landed gentry, he was born in the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, near Stockport in the north-west of England. His army officer father was killed in the First World War.

At school he met W. H. Auden, who became his lifelong friend. He later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he met Stephen Spender, who was at Oxford University with Auden. Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to men, he moved to Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its deserved reputation for sexual freedom. He worked as a private tutor while writing the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains and a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin. These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera and the subsequent musical Cabaret. A memorial plaque to Isherwood has been erected on the house in Schöneberg, Berlin where he lived.

Auden and Isherwood travelled first to China in 1938 and then emigrated to the United States in 1939. (The convenient timing of this move, coming just as Britain was about to be engulfed in the Second World War, placed them under a cloud and their reputations suffered for a time.) Isherwood settled in California, where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Followers, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, he first met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale and J. Krishnamurti. Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

Isherwood became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1946.

From 1953 until his death, Isherwood lived with his life partner, the portrait artist Don Bachardy. Isherwood died in Santa Monica, California. [Portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy above by David Hockney]
Source: Wikipedia

Harold Norse

Harold Norse born 6 July 1916 (d. 2009)

Harold Norse was an American writer, who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse has been widely published and anthologised.

Norse became a part of W H Auden's 'inner circle' at the age of 22 when he and his then boyfriend Chester Kallman - who was to become Auden's life partner - went to an Auden and Isherwood reading on the English pair's arrival in New York, but soon found himself allied with William Carlos Williams, who rated Norse the 'best poet of [his] generation'.

From 1954-59 he lived in Italy. He penned the experimental cut-up novel Beat Hotel in 1960 while living in Paris with William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He returned to live in the US in 1969.

Memoirs of a Bastard Angel traces Norse's life and literary career with W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, e e cummings, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, James Baldwin, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski, Robert Graves and Anaïs Nin.

With Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems 1941-1976 Norse became a leading gay liberation poet. His collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force, appeared in 2003.

Norse is a two-time NEA grant recipient, and National Poetry Association award winner. Norse received a BA from Brooklyn College (1938) and an MA from New York University (1951).

He lived in the Mission District of San Francisco for the last 35 years of his life.

Harold Norse died in San Francisco on 8 June 2009.

Donald Windham

Donald Windham born 2 July 1920 (d. 2010)

Donald Windham was an American novelist and memoirist. He was perhaps best known for his close friendships with Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Windham moved with his partner Fred Melton, an artist, to New York City in 1939. He collaborated with Williams on a play, You Touched Me!, based on a D H Lawrence story, in 1942.

In 1943, after Melton had married, Windham met Sandy Montgomery Campbell [pictured left with Windham], who became his lifelong partner. An actor and publisher of high quality limited editions, Campbell published many of the first editions of Windham's works, until his death in 1988.

Windham became estranged from Williams in the seventies after Williams published his inaccurate Memoirs (1975). Windham later published a volume of their correspondence, which Williams incorrectly claimed was done without his permission. Windham remained a friend of Capote until Capote's death. Windham also met and befriended such diverse figures as Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchew and Paul Cadmus. Windham's diaries and memoirs have made as much of a contribution - certainly to gay studies - as his published fiction.

Windham's novels include The Dog Star (1950), praised by André Gide and Thomas Mann, The Hero Continues (1960), which was likely based on Williams, and Tanaquil (1972), based on the life of George Platt Lynes. Lost Friendships, a memoir of his friendships with Capote and Williams and others, was published in 1987. It has been regarded by some as his best book.

Windham died at his home in Manhattan on 31 May 2010.

Obituary - New York Times

[Pictured left: Windham with E M Forster]

 Donald Windham, second from left, in 1949 at Cafe Nicholson in Manhattan with, from left, the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the artist Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal

Donald Vining

Donald Vining born 20 June 1917 (d.1998)

Donald Vining was an American writer, publisher and diarist whose published diaries comprise a unique slice of gay American life in the 20th century.

Donald Vining was born in Benton, Pennsylvania. He attended West Chester University in Pennsylvania prior to attending the Yale School of Drama, where he was a playwrighting major. A number of his plays have been produced for the stage and for the WICC Radio Listeners' Theatre, broadcast on the Yankee Network. His plays were subsequently published in such volumes as Yale Radio Plays and Plays For Players.

In the 1950s he served as Drama Editor of What's Cookin' magazine and wrote numerous freelance articles and stories for other varied publications and periodicals. After a 30 year career at Teacher's College, Columbia University, he took early retirement to start his own publishing company, The Pepys Press. This publishing firm produced five volumes of his acclaimed A Gay Diary as well as a book of diaries from the Second World War, American Diaries of World War II, and other works.

Vining published essays on gay relationships — his own with his partner Richmond Purinton lasted more than 43 years — which appeared in varied American periodicals. He also wrote numerous scripts, plays, poems and stories throughout his lifetime. His first story published in book form was in Cross-Section 1945 with his Show Me The Way To Go Home. Vining's short story The Old Dog was later published in Story Magazine, soon after immortalised in the book Story: The Fiction of The Forties, and today continues to be used in schools across the USA.

He was selected for inclusion in the Who's Who in the East 25th Edition, published in 1994. He died in New York City on January 24, 1998 at the age of 80.

A Gay Diary is, unquestionably, the richest historical document of gay male life in the United States that I have ever encountered... It chronicles a whole life in which homosexuality is but one part and an ever-changing part at that. And, it illuminates a critical period in gay male American history.

Body Politic

Donald Vining Website

Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem born 23 October 1923

Ned Rorem is a noted American composer and diarist. He is most well known and praised for his song settings, although his work has been varied and includes three symphonies.

He was born in Richmond, Indiana and received his early education in Chicago at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the American Conservatory and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally the Juilliard School in New York City.

During the time he lived in Morocco and Paris (1949-57), his song texts came from several languages.

In 1969 he published his Paris Diary, which, with his later diaries, has brought him some degree of notoriety, as he is honest about his and others' sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber and Virgil Thomson, and outing at least a few people.

Ned Rorem's official website