Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Marketplace of Ideas, American Studies and The Metaphysical Club.
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Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was published in 1946. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice worked to ban the book. Copies were seized from bookstores and libraries. Upon republication in 1959, the banned was lifted. #BannedBooks @nypl https://t.co/9blb2jlHXf https://t.co/5PKHkK9orS
"The devil has a field day in suburbia. The main scene of the story (when it is not Manhattan Island) is in the countryside somewhere on the commuters' cocktail circuit near New York. Outwardly it is realistic down to the last croquet set. But it is also obviously named for Hecate, that three-headed goddess of black magic, nightmares and the underworld..."
-- The New York Times
"The stories thus rattle with tension...the unasked question these tales seem to answer is, What will happen to the Revolution? Or, since each story is a reminiscence from the 1930s back to the pre-Crash 1920s, Which legacy will endure, that of the Jazz Age or the Red Decade? Vanderbilt or Winthrop?"
-- Rain Taxi