Telling Time

As a college president, Thomas Westerly, 72, was a paragon of virtue, a crusader for everything from civil rights to ecology. Now, as he lies dying surrounded by his children, he asks them to go through his papers and destroy anything deemed embarrassing. The children are stunned by the request. ...

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.