Nineteen-year-old Vance Weston has grown up in the fictional Midwestern town of Euphoria, Illinois. Though under pressure to join his father in real estate, Vance aspires to be a poet. After falling ill just as he is supposed to choose his profession, he convalesces for a while at home until a doctor suggests time away in a better climate would aid his recovery.
Vance chooses to stay with relatives, the Tracys, in a small town not far from New York City; his hope is that he might be able to visit the latter during his stay and get his foot in the door of the literary world. The Tracys are caretakers for an old house owned by the much wealthier Spear family. Vance accompanies his cousins to the house, which is in the titular Hudson River Bracketed architectural style. In its library he meets a young woman from the Spear family, Heloise, known as “Halo.” This chance encounter is the first in a series of coincidences that will enable Vance’s writerly dreams to take shape.
Hudson River Bracketed differs from most of Edith Wharton’s novels in that its protagonist is both male and materially disadvantaged. Having distanced the main character from her own life in these two respects, Wharton allowed herself, it’s widely thought, to be more freely autobiographical in portraying her experiences as a fledgling novelist.
The novel is generally appreciated not so much for the depth of its characters, which one contemporary reviewer in the New Statesman said resembled “marionettes,” but for the light it sheds on Wharton’s own creative process of fiction writing, and her attitude towards the mercenary side of publishing—including the exploitation of new writers as a commercial strategy. Also notably explored are the many human factors that affect the awarding of literary prizes like the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction , which Wharton won in 1921 for The Age of Innocence and which explicitly appears in the novel as the “Pulsifer Prize.”
