The Dead of the House

“Delicately distilled perfection.” –The New York Times
“A rare specimen of nearly perfect writing.” –Publisher’s Weekly
“This is evocation at the level of magic.” –Wallace Stegner

A teenage girl’s coming-of-age in the Midwest in the 1940s, centering on her relationship with her father and grandfather. About it, Tillie Olsen wrote, “Wondrous, a true American classic . . . the timeless magic which is art.” The Dead of the House is a novel that has, in the years since it was first published, solidified itself as American canon. This is the first and only novel published by Hannah Green, who died in 1996. She spent nearly two decades writing the book.

Hannah Green (1927-1996) is an American author whose one book published in her lifetime, The Dead of the House, was received with great enthusiasm when it was released in 1972 and again upon its rerelease in 1996. While an undergraduate at Wellesley, Green took a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov on Russian literature in translation. She went on to receive an MFA at Stanford, where she met Wallace Stegner and Tillie Olsen; the latter became a lifelong friend. One more book of Hannah Green’s was published posthumously, Little Saint: My Book of the Hours of Saint Foy, which Green had worked on for 25 years. She also had articles published in The New Yorker. Green was born in Ohio and lived much of her adult life in New York, teaching writing at Columbia University and later at New York University.