Introducing Thomas Wolfe
Writers are always looking for material to write about. The right material is half the job. American writer six-foot-seven-inch Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) wrote about himself. When he wrote he strove to use everything. He wanted to put all the experiences of his life into books. He might write thousands of words about a young man waiting for a train–just waiting as he recalled having once done. Every experience had to be used; nothing could be left out, a goal that was the source of his distinctive achievements and his greatest weakness, for the immensity of his goal was an impossible ambition.
All writers are equipped with a good memories, but Thomas Wolfe’s memory was astonishing. Because of it he was able with ease to recall events, people, and places in stunning detail. That was his strength. His weakness was an inability to restrain the deluge of words that poured out of him from evening to dawn as he wrote, or when he spoke, and he simply, despite himself, had no ability to stay within the requirements of writing a saleable novel. He had no concept of how to write such a book and needed the help of his editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, who at the same time was the editor of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two other difficult clients.
The manuscripts Wolfe turned in to Perkins were of enormous lengths, twice as long to War and Peace. They required tens of thousands of words–or hundreds of thousands–being cut. But Wolfe, being told to go home and cut fifteen thousand more words, might go home and add twenty or twenty-five thousand. Wolfe would sit looking at the manuscript with no idea of what to do to shape it into a novel that could be sold at a book store. The only way Perkins could get Wolfe to stop adding words was to take the book away from him and send it to the printer without Wolfe knowing.
A Sketch of Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe was the most naïve and trusting man on earth and wanted everyone to be his friend. His belief in hard work was almost holy. He wrote all night, each night producing thousands of words on large scrolls of newsprint that he dropped on the floor for an assistant to try to paginate.
He was a big man in many ways, not just in his physical size, but in terms of his ambitions, his memory, and the intensity of his emotions. To Wolfe, the need to write–to spare no effort, to exhaust himself writing–was paramount. Whenever he was distracted from working he would fall into a black mood; then he would brood, drink, and pace New York streets all night, telephoning his friends and accusing them of betraying him. The next day he would call them and apologize abjectly. He was governed almost wholly by his insatiable need to write.
Wolfe inherited from his father the richness, rhetoric, and music of his prose and the gusto with which he lived. His vocabulary was immense, and his ability to select from it the right word, phrase or image was, and is, unrivaled by any other writer. From his mother he acquired his enormously retentive memory and his dogged attraction to long-sustained, exhausting work.
Wolfe’s Most Important Relationships
Three relationships were most important in Wolfe’s life: with his parents, his lover Aline Bernstein, and his editor Maxwell Perkins (considered the best editor any writer ever had). Aline Bernstein, a beautiful, brilliantly successful stage designer and one of the directors of the Neighborhood Playhouse, had more charm in her little finger than most people have in their whole body. Wolfe met her in September, 1925 when he was twenty-five. She was nineteen years older at forty-four and a married woman. He wrote about her that “that woman would become his heart’s centre.” It was love at first sight for both of them. Wolfe had been involved with other women, but Bernstein was the one great love affair of his life, and the influence she had on him was incalculably great.
Without her unwavering belief and confidence in him and her substantial financial and emotional support, he could never have written Look Homeward Angel when he did. She made it possible materially and spiritually for him to write it while he taught English at NYU. For six years she guided and transformed his life until 1931 when their affair ended bitterly. Often Wolfe’s relationships ended bitterly, for example his working relationship with Perkins–editor, confidant, adviser, creditor, and friend, the most important relationship in Perkins’ life.
A Writer’s Life Becomes More Difficult with Each Succeeding Book
After having his first book (Look Homeward Angel) successfully published, Wolfe wrote about the difficulties of each succeeding work, the travails of the life of a creative person. He wrote that the writer is alone: “At that time, among the many other things I did not know, I did not know that for a man who wants to continue with the creative life, to keep on growing and developing, this cheerful idea of happy establishment, of continuing now as one has started, is nothing but a delusion and a snare. I did not know that if a man really has in him the desire and the capacity to create, the power of further growth and further development, there can be no such thing as an easy road. I did not know that so far from having found out about writing, I had really found out almost nothing … I had made a first and simple utterance; but I did not know that each succeeding one would not only be … more difficult than the last, but would be completely different–that with each new effort would come new desperation, the new, and old, sense of having to begin from the beginning all over again; of being face to face again with the old naked facts of self and work; of realizing again that there is no help anywhere save the help and strength that one can find within himself.”
Fame is Fleeting
No writer in the nineteen thirties–or even now–could write with the beauty of Thomas Wolfe’s prose. His reputation after his death suffered because of the perceived formlessness and verbiage of his writing in an age when critics preferred tight structure and economy of language–short sentences and short episodes, and highly-focused scenes rather than the volume and torrents of Wolfe’s language. Once considered by Nobel Prize winners William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis to be America’s finest writer, and in the past extremely popular with readers and critics, Wolfe is now almost never read–unfortunately in my opinion, if one is interested in being inspired by the brilliance of written expression. Hard as you look, you will not find Thomas Wolfe–once thought a towering genius–in current anthologies of American literature.
© 2025 David J. Rogers
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Psychologists classify people in categories according to their personality traits. Yet they cannot measure 
I was excited waking up at 3:00 A.M. yesterday, and I was not thinking of going back to sleep. I wanted to finish some poems where I had left off the night before. I thought, “Let my wife–a calmer, less excitable person–sleep; I 
Intense writers and artists do everything intensely–experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining. They are significantly different human beings from other writers and artists (and agents and family members and co-workers) who are not intense. They feel their emotions strongly. They soar high with elevated emotions, and they plunge into dark 
Intensity is a quality found in many creative people that facilitates artistic pursuits. Abbe Dimnet said that the creator’s intensity will be reflected in the quality of the work: “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” Henry James wrote: “It is art that makes life, makes intensity, makes importance.” Horace said, “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” It is their intensity that gives them strength. Keats said, “The excellency of every art is its intensity “ A problem every writer and artist faces is maintaining in every phase of their story or painting the intensity that keeps it going and energizes the creator’s every gesture and the work’s every detail. They must be able to generate and sustain intensity as they work.
Who could be more intense than poet Walt Whitman who expressed a wish to have “one hour of madness and joy,” “to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom,” “To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.” Who more intense than novelists Charles Dickens with his phenomenal storehouse of drive that enabled him to work on a multiplicity of books, speeches, plays, travels, and social projects at the same time without ever tiring?
thousands of hours developing yours (so that I’d recognize anywhere that it is yours), I have consciously spent many hours developing mine.
changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent” (Pat Conroy).
davidjrogersftw 
Why Are So Many Talented Writers Unsuccessful?
I’m assuming that you have a writing talent, and that you may even have been the most talented in your class, in your school, and now are the
most talented in your writers’ group, most talented in your home town. That’s something to be proud of. But talent alone isn’t enough to make you a highly successful writer in the competitive field of creative writing in which almost everyone is talented, everyone gifted, and everyone exceptional.
But there are qualities other than talent that will determine how successful, fulfilling, and happy your writing career will be in that competitive world of very talented people. That hard-to-define stuff called talent is just one of the many requirements of the writer who excels. If you are relying solely on the talent you were born with to bring you writing success and happiness you are making a mistake.
Poet John Berryman thought that talent was no more than 20% of a successful poet’s personality, and why shouldn’t the same may be true of novelists, dramatists, screen writers, and essayists? What I’m asking is, “What comprises the eighty percent of a writer’s personality that blended with natural talent brings about success?”
To that question there are innumerable possible answers. According to writers, teachers, critics, and researchers other factors that are important are:
Endurance/ Persistence
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut said that talent was extremely common, but what is rare is endurance, the willingness to endure the sometimes difficult and trying life of the writer. Many writers have come to the conclusion that sheer old-fashioned day-by-day doggedness is the key to writers’ success. In the book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes says, “Success as a writer is within the grasp of whoever can tell a story on paper that people want to hear and is willing to persevere, to put up with boredom, frustration, and anxiety. Determined writers will find ways to get published regardless of whether they are brilliant or have a degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.”
Passion, Intensity, Obsessiveness, Willpower, and Patience
Among the personal qualities that cause motivation strong enough to sustain a writer through the inevitable trials, disappointments, setbacks, and self-doubts are those that are not luxuries but necessities for any writer who is in any way serious about writing: passion, intensity, obsessiveness, willpower, and patience. Gertrude Stein said that all of a writer’s work comes out of a passion as a powerful force, and added that if you really have that passion you aren’t able to recognize it because you don’t know what it is to feel any differently. Many people with obsessive compulsiveness–including writers I’ve known–are especially productive not despite that affliction but because of it.
Hard Work, Commitment, and the Hunger for Success
Writing teachers are generally in agreement that it’s not the best, most talented students whose names they see in print in later years, but the hardest workers and the hungriest for success. The students with the most talent but the weakest work ethic who dazzled the class disappear into oblivion, while the hard workers often go on to great achievements. Many prodigiously gifted but poorly motivated people do not end up where gifted people belong: in the upper echelons of their field. Without pursuing all your goals with clear-mindedness, confidence, and commitment over years, you’ll probably quit after repeated failure.
Every writer, as every artist and every actor, who experiences minimal success eventually asks “Should I quit?” or lowers their ambitions. Writers who have achieved a high level of excellence and success are not satisfied to reach merely an acceptable level of performance, but are motivated to pursue increasingly higher goals.
Example of Pursing Increasingly Higher Creative Goals: Frank Loesser
Self-Confidence and The Need to do Your Best
Those who are sure of themselves intensify their efforts when they don’t reach their goal. Studies of high-performers in all the arts show that they are all universally alike: over and over again they are people who believe in trying to excel, in doing one’s best, in working very hard and spending time constructively. They are intensely attracted to their field from their first exposure to it and all through their efforts to develop their skills and their “reach.” In fact, if you have an intense interest in a creative field, that in itself is almost always a sign that you have a natural talent in it.
The Effect of Passing Comments
Talent can be ignited at any time. The cause of motivation to write a 300 page book or continue on the writer’s life path may be nothing more than a passing comment. Simply being told by someone else or telling yourself that you can achieve much more through trying harder will get most people to try harder. Just being told that they are talented is often enough to start people off to develop that talent.
An Analogy
Talent in writing will not bring success unless it is supplemented by other human qualities. Without endurance, determination, intensity, passion for writing, obsessiveness, will power, hard work, commitment, hunger for success, and self-confidence a writer would be analogous to an automobile–beautiful, streamlined, expertly designed–but lacking an engine.
© 2023 David J. Rogers
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Filed under Confidence, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, High Achievement, Intensity, Persistence, Success, Willpower, Writers, Writers' Characteristics
Tagged as Frank Loesser, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut, passing comments, Ralph Keyes