Goodbye, Wisconsin, Glenway Wescott’s excellent story collection first published in 1928, is the latest title brought back to the world’s attention, thanks to Belt Publishing’s Revivals series. The stories in the book, along with their author, ought to be of great interest to readers in 2026.
A gay man born on a farm in Southeastern Wisconsin in 1901, Wescott left the state as a young man for Chicago, then Santa Fe, then Berlin, then Paris. Writing in France after World War One, Wescott moved in circles with expat artists including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In 1927, he published his novel The Grandmothers to much acclaim in Europe and beyond. When the political and economic situation in Europe deteriorated in the next decade, however, Wescott and his lifelong partner Monroe Wheeler moved back to America to live in a house on a dairy farm Wescott’s brother bought in New Jersey.
Themes of dislocation, relocation, and return connect the stories in Goodbye, Wisconsin. A sailor back home on his family’s Wisconsin farm tells stories of wild European ports as his brother sweats through the chores that fill his life. A young man stands at the altar and returns in his mind to a past love with a married woman who turned him away when her husband returned to the region. A woman who killed the man she thought she would marry completes her prison sentence and returns to people and places she no longer knows:
“Free and out of doors, she was astonished by the mediocrity of her feelings. There was the immortal blue sunlight, the seedy trees in line against the brick walls, as vivid on the outside as they were leaden within, and beyond them the flimsy residences, the lawns rich with hammocks, washing, pigeons, children at play. The sight of these things did not quite penetrate her heart.”
Physical details of Wisconsin, from “immortal blue sunlight” to hammock-rich lawns of “flimsy residences,” pervade the stories, grounding them in places that are, for Wescott and his characters, both recognizable and no longer familiar. In Goodbye, Wisconsin, the past is a home to which you cannot return for good, but which you cannot leave once and for all.
Writing against a view, common then as now, that Wisconsin is peopled by shy conformists, Wescott describes in his story “Prohibition” an alcoholic ne’er-do-well called Old Reilly of whom others do not approve but whom others cannot bring themselves to condemn:
“In spite of his practical jokes and his bad example to the young, the sober God-fearing farmers and their wives could not hate him at any time. The mingling of joy and catastrophe in his life confused even the most opinionated among them. They regarded him as something less than a man, an irresponsible animal in human form.”
In that final line, Wescott highlights how others’ tolerance, although better than utter rejection, is based on a view of Reilly as less than human. Wescott, however, refuses to sanctify Reilly, telling how he abuses his family when home from a bender. Just because a society cannot bring itself to condemn a man does not mean that man is innocent. At the end of the story, Reilly has both hands and feet amputated after falling asleep in the snow. Some Prohibitionists in town visit his home, hoping to see Reilly learned his lesson about the evils of drink:
“They found the little mutilated man who had been the terror of the community lying in a bay-window, and forgot what they had come for. The room was filled with an atmosphere of patience, indolence, and lawlessness… For he was drunk, though he had been punished by a divine law against it and though a law on earth had been passed… He seemed to enjoy the scrutiny due him as an object lesson and not to care what the moral was…”
Reading these stories today, you’re struck by both the strangeness and the familiarity of the Wisconsin Wescott bids farewell. Characters pass through Milwaukee and Chicago, but much of the action takes place on farms and in small towns like Brussels and Belleville. Wisconsin still has plenty of farms and towns—I pass Belleville when I drive from Madison to my parents’ house—but these places, as Wescott describes them, can seem like an exotic world lost to us today. Without modern highways to disappear down or home radios to tune in the wider world, Wescott’s characters seem stuck in local lives from which they can escape—and some do escape—only on a wing and a prayer. Then again, these local figures from long ago seem just as lost, ambitious, angry, kind, and amorous as any reader today. Wescott shows in his stories what is enduring and what we can never bid goodbye to in Wisconsin, and all points beyond.
FICTION
Goodbye, Wisconsin
By Glenway Wescott
Belt Publishing
Published on October 20, 2026
