The New York Times obituary for George Whitmore, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1989 aged just forty-three, tells of a principled and poignant life. The author of three novels and three plays, Whitmore was a conscientious objector who spent the Vietnam War working at Planned Parenthood. He also advocated for low-income housing, covered the AIDS epidemic as a journalist and successfully sued a dental clinic that refused to treat him because of his AIDS diagnosis. And yet he is little known today.

His 1987 novel Nebraska, long out of print but happily reissued this year, opens in 1956 in the hospital bed of our narrator, Craig Mullen. Craig is twelve years old and now an amputee as the result of a car accident that has reconfigured his world. When Craig falsely accuses