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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