He gave up 40 years of heavy drinking in the middle of it. Life to an epic historical novel set in Wethersfield, once again called “Pequot Landing.” The “Big Book,” he said, was his “bete noire.” He researched and researched and rewrote and rewrote. Out in Los Angeles by the pool, Tryon devoted 14 years of his Wethersfield coursed irrevocably through his veins. Tryons had been among the town’s first settlers in the early 17th century. “God knows he didn’t come home that much,” says his younger brother William Tryon. When he died last fall at the age of 65, Tryon was living in the Hollywood Hills. But things were quieter back then, in the ’30s and ’40s. Tryon and his two brothers grew up in a house his parents built on Wolcott Hill Road, separated from Old Wethersfield by the roar of traffic on the Silas Deane. Tryon’s Libya Hill, his Yoknapatawpha County, was Wethersfield, the pretty little historic town on the Cove, the one sliced in half by the Silas Deane Highway, with its ugly 20th-century parade of doughnut shops, laundromats and supermarkets. He liked it out in L.A., the scene of a mediocre movie career he gratefully abandoned for the more hospitable embrace of the best-seller list.Īs a writer, Thomas Tryon shared Thomas Wolfe’s elegiac, ambivalent bond with his hometown, leaving - only to return, obsessively, in his imagination. Hollywood glittered for Tom Tryon, from the time he was old enough to hop a trolley and head for the picture show in Hartford in the ’30s.
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