BiblioVault - Books about Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward

A Life of Thomas Wolfe

David Herbert Donald

Harvard University Press, 2002

Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow of prose was shaped into novels by his editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins.

In this definitive and compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Herbert Donald dismantles that myth and demonstrates that Wolfe was a boldly aware experimental artist who, like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, deliberately pushed at the boundaries of the modern novel. Donald takes a new measure of this complex, tormented man as he reveals Wolfe’s difficult childhood, when he was buffeted between an alcoholic father and a resentful mother; his “magical” years at the University of North Carolina, where his writing talent first flourished; his rise to literary fame after repeated rejection; and the full story of Wolfe’s passionate affair with Aline Bernstein, including their intimate letters.

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Thomas Wolfe

Memoir of a Friendship

By Robert Raynolds

University of Texas Press, 1965

This is a story that no one else could tell. It tells how Thomas Wolfe and Robert Raynolds happened to meet, how they became friends, and how their friendship grew, survived a crisis, and continued until the death of Thomas Wolfe. "We met in the city," says Raynolds, "but Tom and I were both mountain-born and small-town bred; we were more at home with cows and rattlesnakes than with subways and city slickers, and we were very much at home with one another." The story is told with understanding, with humor, and with compassion. Robert Raynolds began writing it in 1942—four years after the death of his friend and companion novelist—and finished it twenty-three years later, in 1965. It is a responsible and considered memoir in honor of human friendship, and it brings the vivid character of Thomas Wolfe directly into the presence of the reader. The story is full of daily portraits of Thomas Wolfe. What did he look like in his room, pacing the floor, or writing? How did he appear on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan, day or night? Or walking in the morning in a pine forest, or running his hand gently over a block of marble in an abandoned quarry, or tramping fields of snow after midnight? What was it like to eat with him at night in New York, or at noon in a Vermont farmhouse, or at breakfast in a home made lively by the laughter and play of children? He was shy. "Why don't you find me a nice little wife?" he would ask Mrs. Raynolds. He was emotional, often speaking in the style of his writing: "And the whistle-wail of the great train. . ." He was profound, brooding after his break with his first publishers: could a man who had left a friend as he had left Maxwell Perkins ever be a "righteous man" again? This is a story of the plain and real Thomas Wolfe, of his human goodness, his bone-deep weariness in labor, his sudden joy in being understood and loved by a fellow man. And this is the story of how Robert Raynolds honored the grace of being a friend of Thomas Wolfe.

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Thomas Wolfe

When Do the Atrocities Begin?

Joanne Marshall Mauldin

University of Tennessee Press, 2007

In 1937, after years of living alone in New York City, a manic-depressive Thomas Wolfe returned to his family and his native Asheville, North Carolina, a city he had both ridiculed and brought notoriety to through his novel, Look Homeward, Angel, eight years earlier. Concerned about lingering resentment from the community over the literary work and his tenuous relationship with his family members, Wolfe returned to his hometown with caution, but also with the need to both rejuvenate and compile material for his next novel. It is this visit that sparks Wolfe's trademark conclusion, “You can't go home again.” During 1937 and 1938, Thomas Wolfe experienced extreme highs and lows as he labored furiously to produce his next work. Joanne Marshall Mauldin provides an in-depth look at those final two years in the life of the brilliant, yet troubled writer in Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin?

By adding new information and insight, Mauldin challenges much of the existing biographical material on the writer and offers a fresh view on the final years of his life. Through the utilization of primary and secondary sources including letters, interviews, recordings, and newspaper clippings, Mauldin offers a candid account of the life of Thomas Wolfe from the time of his visit to North Carolina in 1937 until his untimely death in 1938. Mauldin chronicles details of Wolfe's shocking change in publishers and his complex relationships with his editors, family, friends, and his mistress. This examination goes beyond Wolfe's life and extends into the period after his death, revealing details about the reaction of family and friends to the passing of this literary legend, as well as the cavalier publishing practices of his posthumous editors.

Mauldin's narrative is unique from other biographical accounts of Thomas Wolfe in that it focuses solely on the final years in the life of the author. Her unbiased approach enables the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about Wolfe and his actions and state of mind during these last two years of his life.

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