The Memoirs of Hecate County — Edmund Wilson

An upper-middle-class intellectual narrates this classic collection of six stories exploring lust and love in mid-twentieth-century American society.

“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

Controversial upon publication in 1946, Memoirs of Hecate County remained banned for more than a decade before being reissued. A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson's erotic and devastating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.

“I have read your book Memoirs of Hecate County in one swallow. There are lots of wonderful things in it.” -- Vladimir Baokov

“There is a true whiff of hell in Hecate County -- in the low ceilings and cheap underwear of the sex idyll, the clothes and neuroses of the copulators. . . . After 1946, Hecate Counties would spread and multiply and set the new cultural tone. The suburban home would replace the city street as the theater of hopes; private fulfillment and not public justice would set the pace of the pursuit of happiness. Wilson foretold it, casting his fiction in the coming mode, of sexual candor, dark sardonic fantasy, and confessional fragment.” -- John Updike