WESTON

A short history of Weston

Weston is best known for its connection with novelist Nard Jones (1904–1972), who lived in the city with his parents between 1919 and 1927, and whose first novel Oregon Detour was set in an Oregon town of 600 inhabitants called "Creston". When his novel, written according to the tenets of the New Realism literary movement (established years before by Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis and others) was published in 1930, many of the residents were convinced that his characters were based on local inhabitants, and considered the work a slander against the town. While the legend that Jones was sued and ran out of town for his book is not true, members of the town made an effort to locally suppress access to the book: copies of the novel were stolen from the local library; after the novel became the subject for a high school student's book report, his English teacher removed the book from both the reading list and the high school library. According to George Venn, local literary historian, even in the 1980s, "trying to figure out or trying to remember who the 'real people' in the novel is still a local pastime."

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Weston, Oregon, revision 1378271790 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.