The Wisest Man in America (Hardscrabble Books-fiction of New England) - Softcover

Wetherell, W. D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874517613 ISBN 13: 9780874517613

Publisher: Univ Pr of New England, 1995

Synopsis

It's 1996 and Ferris, a native New Englander as flinty and proud as the mountains around him, is once again about to predict the winners of the New Hampshire primary. He's been right in every election since 1952, when fate and a nose for news first led Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Max Thomas to his door. It wasn't long before Ferris's uncanny accuracy began drawing the great and the not-so-great to the Notch to sound out -- and perhaps influence -- the crusty bellwether of political success or failure. This election, however, is different, as both Ferris and Max face the hardest test of their wisdom: confronting the truth about themselves, their lives and loves, and a society that has declined painfully during their half century of friendship.

W. D. Wetherell, author of the critically acclaimed Chekhov's Sister, creates a bittersweet retrospective that is at once profoundly meditative on the intricacies of human relationships and full of sharp insight into the diminishment of the American national character. Ferris senses "a sickness" afflicting America's youth. Max, at the end of a career of writing about wars, the empty wisdom of leaders, and the decay of nations, laments of his own country, "The world's been in a race toward total confusion, and we've gotten there first."

Yet both men come to reject those bleak pronouncements, as each mines meaning from his past and avoids "he worst of all fates: a life that for good or evil had left no impression at all." Wetherell's elegiac story of loss and redemption is a study in the universal struggle to identify what values are lasting amidst the sometimes deafening tumult of change.

About this title

About the Author

W. D. Wetherell's other books include Wherever That Great Heart May Be (1996), The Smithsonian Guide to the Natural Places of Northern New England (1994), Upland Stream (1991), Hyannis Boat and Other Stories (1989), and The Man Who Loved Levittown (1985). He has won two NEA Fellowships, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the National Magazine Award, and other honors. His novel Chekhov's Sister was selected as one of the Notable Books of 1990 by the New York Times.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Pr of New England
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874517613
• ISBN 13: 9780874517613
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236