This extraordinary autobiographical narrative (told in the third person) is a revelation as uncompromising and unsparing as its author's attitude toward art. An invention in form comparable to the work of Sterne or Joyce, Ushant is the story of one of America's greatest men of letters who, as a boy, witnessed the tragic deaths of his father and mother, grew up with a cast of New England relatives who might have stepped variously from the pages of hawthorne and Howells, and participated in the Boston, London, and new York literary scenes of the last half century.