Prologos is Jonathan Bayliss's sparkling, complex, experimental, playful, serious, richly detailed literary masterpiece of the 20th century whose protagonist, Michael Chapman, is the "author" or "controller" of the other three novels in Bayliss's GLOUCESTERMAN tetralogy. The foreground is California's Bay Area about a decade after the end of World War 2. The background is the pre-war East Coast (Cambridge, Gloucester, Manhattan) and the wartime and post-war Pacific of Chapman's Naval service. Living in Oakland with wife and children, he yearns for the Gloucester that he left as a child, and for the European world he's never seen. He is torn three ways by domestic love, by the practical matters of his livelihood, and by the conflicts of intellectual life. No one reader will sympathize with all the manias or crochets either of Chapman or of his friend Caleb Karcist. But a thoughtful reading will engage almost anyone's mind with the novel's intellectual departures from traditional narrative. Prologos generates anthropological, economic, technical, and literary ideas from a base of erotic and social realism. This novel is a diamond mine for digging, a sandy stream for panning gold. Prologos is among the most significant experiments in narrative form in the last fifty years of American fiction. --Gary Grieve-Carlson, professor of English and author of Olson's Prose Jonathan Bayliss (1926-2009) studied at Harvard, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and finished his A.B. at the University of California at Berkeley. While writing two plays and the four GLOUCESTERMAN novels, Bayliss earned his livelihood in positions involved with sales analysis, accounting controls, and executive management, beginning in 1950 at a Berkeley bookstore. In the 1960s, as controller at Gorton's of Gloucester, the frozen-fish processor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he transformed administrative operations, initiating the development of integrated business systems with the IBM 360 mainframe computer. After leaving Gorton's in 1972, Bayliss devoted five years to full-time writing. Later he worked for the City of Gloucester as administrative manager for the mayor and as city treasurer. In 1985 he resumed full-time work on his tetralogy. Bayliss was putting the finishing touches on the final novel, Gloucestermas , when he died in 2009 at the age of 82. The GLOUCESTERMAN novels are headed by Prologos and include the trilogy Gloucesterbook , Gloucestertide , and Gloucestermas . Bayliss's two plays, The Tower of Gilgamesh and The Acts of Gilgamesh, are interspersed within the novels, which may be read in any order.