Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955

Before he vanished in the fog of San Francisco, Weldon Kees (1914-55) was a poet, storyteller, critic, painter, musician, and filmmaker. What remains is a body of work and a large collection of letters that shed light on Kees’s complex personality. Robert E. Knoll traces the odyssey of a Nebraska boy who made his way in a fiercely competitive national scene, befriending the movers and shakers of the art worlds on both coasts. Kees’s letters–satirical, witty, poetic, gossipy, intensely individual–provide the feel of lives being lived, of a career going forth, and finally, of the darkness that engulfed him when, in Knoll’s phrase, he was “ten minutes from triumph.”