My failed attempt to unite the Upstate New York literary scene
When, in my late twenties, I returned home as a self-dramatizing repatriate to wreak my unspeakable visions of the individual upon a world that never asked for them, I determined to meet the men who were my ancestors (even if they were blissfully unaware of this avuncular connection). Upstate New York has a fine literary tradition, stretching from Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Harold Frederic through Edmund Wilson, Carl Carmer and Frederick Exley. From the due-date stamps I could tell that I was the first person in decades to take out Philander Deming or Josephine Young Case. If the stars of the generation then passing burned less brightly in the firmament, well, then it was up to me to illuminate them.
