Thomas Wolfe

"A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth."

 

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early 20th century.^[1]

Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.

After Wolfe's death, contemporary author William Faulkner said that Wolfe might have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer.^[1][2] Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others.^[3] He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered North Carolina's most famous writer.

Wolfe was unable to sell any of his plays after three years because of their great length.^[8] The Theatre Guild came close to producing Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, and Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage.^[1] He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland.

On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1880–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. Twenty years his senior, she was married to a successful stockbroker with whom she had two children. In October 1925, she and Wolfe became lovers and remained so for five years.^[8] Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing.^[8]

Wolfe returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of an autobiographical novel titled O Lost. The narrative, which evolved into Look Homeward, Angel, fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, and chronicled family, friends, and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland". His family's surname became Gant, and Wolfe called himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza. The original manuscript of O Lost was over 1,100 pages (333,000 words) long,^[9][10] and considerably more experimental in style than the final version of Look Homeward, Angel. It was submitted to Scribner's, where the editing was done by Maxwell Perkins, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He cut the book to focus more on the character of Eugene, a stand-in for Wolfe. Wolfe initially expressed gratitude to Perkins for his disciplined editing, but he had misgivings later. It has been said that Wolfe found a father figure in Perkins, and that Perkins, who had five daughters, found in Wolfe a sort of foster son.^[11]

The novel, which had been dedicated to Bernstein, was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929.^[8][12] Soon afterward, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein.^[11] The novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters.^[8][13][14] Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years because of the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[8][15][16] Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany.^[12] Some members of Wolfe's family were upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.^[17]

After four more years writing in Brooklyn,^[16] the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it significantly and create a single volume. Titled Of Time and the River, it was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel.^[8] In an ironic twist, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time because they hadn't been included.^[18] The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein.^[11] In 1934, Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent.

Wolfe was persuaded by Edward Aswell to leave Scribner's and sign with Harper & Brothers.^[19] By some accounts, Perkins' severe editing of Wolfe's work is what prompted him to leave.^[20] Others describe his growing resentment that some people attributed his success to Perkins' work as editor.^[11] In 1936, Bernard DeVoto, reviewing The Story of a Novel for Saturday Review, wrote that Look Homeward, Angel was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners".^[21][22]

Wolfe spent much time in Europe and was especially popular and at ease in Germany, where he made many friends. However, in 1936 he witnessed incidents of discrimination against Jews, which upset him and changed his mind about the political developments in the country.^[22] He returned to America and published a story based on his observations ("I Have a Thing to Tell You") in The New Republic.^[22] Following its publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government, and he was prohibited from traveling there.^[22]

In 1937, Chickamauga, his short story set during the American Civil War battle of the same name, was published.^[23] Wolfe returned to Asheville in early 1937 for the first time since publication of his first book. Wikipedia