After Gregory

Description

Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, tries to drown himself in the Ohio River. Failing to manage even that, he decides to hitch a ride east, fleeing the state and escaping accusations of rape and murder. As he assumes and discards aliases along the way, he believes that he can begin again, a fresh start - but the past has a habit of catching up with all of us, no matter how fast we run...

Austin M. Wright was born in New York in 1922. He was a novelist and academic. He lived with his wife and daughters in Cincinnati, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty.

"This literary and existential mystery-within-a-novel may remind readers of the fiction of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and other authors who chart the modern American search for identity. . . . An intellectual wordsmith's whodunit." --Kirkus Reviews "Wright's fifth novel, a dark, allegorical parable about the links between identity, the past and the need to write, reads like a cross between Paul Auster's The Music of Chance and an episode of the '50s TV series The Millionaire. . . . This novel--told mostly in the unusual second-person singular--is about writing as a way to reconcile our past with who and what we become; it's Wright's brief but stirring conclusion on this subject that makes the book so special." --Publishers Weekly