This book stands as one of the greatest American responses to the thrown gauntlet that is Tristram Shandy. An innovative, uproarious sentimental education, this novel marries the mordant satire of Wylie's Generation of Vipers to what might in other hands have been an ordinary story of frustrated ambition and frustrated love, turning forty-eight hours' worth of drunken conversation into an emotional and typographical explosion.
Philip Wylie (1902–1971) published more than forty books (both fiction and nonfiction), essays, and short stories in his lifetime. A member of the founding staff of the New Yorker, his essays and stories regularly appeared throughout the '40s and '50s in Vanity Fair, Redbook, the Saturday Evening Post, and Cosmopolitan.
