It was another remarkable success for Wescott.

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Late Career

Although Wescott continued to work on novels and stories, he was unable to complete any of them and did not publish any new fiction during the remaining forty-two years of his life.

The reasons for Wescott's silence have long been the subject of critical and biographical speculation. Jerry Rosco, a friend and recent biographer of Wescott's, has commented that the writer simply "lost the feel for fiction" and developed "a curious aversion to being published."

In his essay, Bawer hypothesizes that one reason for the long silence may have been Wescott's homosexuality. As an autobiographical writer, Wescott had already successfully mined his childhood and coming of age. "But few readers, at that time anyway," Bawer notes, "would have regarded [a] sensitive and candid novel based upon Wescott's adult domestic life with anything other than horror."

As Jim Friel has observed, Wescott "could neither write candidly nor, like Thornton Wilder and Somerset Maugham, could he find other means to dissemble his subject. He could only resort to silence--as [British novelist E. M.] Forster had done, hugging Maurice to his chest until the world was fit to read it."

Like Forster, who experienced a similar inability to publish a novel in the final four decades of his life, Wescott did publish several works of nonfiction. Among these works are Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (1962), a collection of essays on his friendship and admiration for the writers Katherine Anne Porter, Somerset Maugham, Colette, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann, and Thornton Wilder.

In 1975, he published The Best of All Possible Worlds: Journals, Letters, and Remembrances, 1914-1937.

He also wrote some explicitly gay short fiction that he was unable to publish during his lifetime. One of these stories, "A Visit to Priapus," written in 1938, appears in The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (2003), edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell.

Additionally, Wescott began editing for publication the journals he had kept from 1937 until the mid-1950s. Although some of his published work hinted obliquely at his homosexuality, the journals focused on his private life and dealt explicitly with his relationships with Wheeler, Lynes, and others. They were published posthumously in 1990 as Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955.

Wescott also channeled his energies into other pursuits. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and later served as president, from 1959 to 1962, of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His work helped secure grants and awards for many new, as well as established, writers.

In the 1950s, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, became a close friend of Wescott's and drew him into the work he was conducting on human sexuality.

Their friendship led Kinsey to ask for assistance with research materials. "He asked me to help him with erotic reading matter," Wescott later explained. "He asked me to . . . look at their library and suggest what they might get rid of, what things to acquire, and to advise the young librarians what things to keep." Over the next several years, Wescott frequently visited the Institute or met with Kinsey in New York.

Wescott also became a central figure in New York's artistic and gay communities in the 1950s and 1960s. The writers W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, and Somerset Maugham, and the artists Paul Cadmus and Jared French, were among his acquaintances.

On February 20, 1987, Wescott died of a stroke at his home in Rosemont, New Jersey. He was 85 years old.

Two days after Wescott's death, Wheeler suffered a massive stroke, which left him legally blind and paralyzed on the left side of his body. He died on August 14, 1988, eighteen months after the death of Wescott.

Although a well-regarded and best-selling writer in his lifetime, Wescott soon fell into near-obscurity, remembered more as a raconteur and as a partner to one of the longest gay marriages in history than as an author. Indeed, his reputation had severely declined long before his death. However, as Bruce Bawer has noted, this decline is "a measure less of his own failings than of the misbegotten values of the literary culture that has allowed him to fall."

Some of Wescott's works have recently been reprinted. The Pilgrim Hawk was reissued in 2001 with an introduction by Michael Cunningham; Apartment in Athens was reissued in 2004 with an introduction by David Leavitt; and The Grandmothers was reissued in 2006 with an introduction by Sargent Bush. Collections of Wescott's manuscripts are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the New York Public Library.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

American painter Paul Cadmus is best known for the satiric innocence of his frequently censored paintings of burly men in skin-tight clothes, but he also created works that celebrate same-sex domesticity.

An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

The acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham examines gay culture within the context of the larger society.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Dissatisfied with merely describing the material world, American painter Jared French devised a pictorial language to explore human unconsciousness and its relation to sexuality.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.

The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, established by Alfred Kinsey in 1947, has pioneered in the study of American sexual behavior.

Novelist and short story writer David Leavitt is one of the brightest stars of the gay literary world today.

American photographer George Platt Lynes made his fame as a fashion and portrait photographer, but his greatest work may have been his dance images and male nudes.

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual.

Frightened by the Oscar Wilde trial, Somerset Maugham avoided treating homosexual themes and characters in his novels and plays.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

Publisher, book designer, and museum director, Monroe Wheeler was a leading figure in New York artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his partner of sixty-eight years, the writer Glenway Wescott. 

The works of Thornton Wilder are landmarks of American literature, but they reveal scant traces of the author's homosexuality.