Product Description
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, Maudlin 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

bright portrait of a troubled genius
This is a rich and absorbing portrait of Thomas Wolfe and the shenanigans that went on around him. Although the book is ostensibly an account of the last year of his life and the year that followed, it is in fact a broader view of the man himself, the world he came from and the world he created.Having limited knowledge of Wolfe's works ("O Lost"), I have nevertheless, after reading Mauldin's sweeping and detailed rendition of these final years, become enraptured with the character of Wolfe and the host of piquant characters that surrounded him in life. This is a delightful and entertaining read. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Amusing and Clever
I am apparently getting really good at randomly picking up books that few people have reviewed. I picked this one up randomly which seems appropriate.

I found this and put it up on top of my monitor. It's a small book and is about architecture and I glanced inside and decided it was worth the time to read it. I picked it up yesterday and started through the 126 pages.

Wolfe is a clever writer. In this book he talks a lot about the architecture schools of the first half of the twentieth century. He goes forward from there and discusses them with biting humor and satire.

Wolfe's writing is sarcastic but seeks to stick to modern given definitions. "Bauhaus" looks at the way modern architecture is a response to the bourgeois. The way the Bauhaus saw bourgeois, it was a dirty word. It is used as an epithet throughout the book.

Merriam Webster defines bourgeois as:

1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of the townsman or of the social middle class

2 : marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity

3 : dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic

The Bauhaus sought to run away from the bourgeois, but with Wolfe's description of bourgeois, the architecture schools seem to embrace it on many levels.

The book is dominated by the evolution of architectural "compounds" such as that founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in the Bauhaus school. The concept of the "group" drove out the individual response to innovation which reminds me so strongly of my very favorite book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The similarities to Rand's text and the actualities promoted by the Bauhaus group as detailed by Wolfe are disconcerting. The comparison between the two is my own opinion, not that of Wolfe.

The Bauhaus group fled Germany because of the great war and came to American where they were established quickly as the shining light of modern design. Gropius himself is referred to as The Silver Prince. Wolfe's narrative talks about the self absorption of these architects and their ability to shove their concept of what was good down the throats of anyone who wanted to build something special. According to Wolfe, American architecture put itself inside the unornamented "box" of modernist thought.

Wolfe does not pull punches. He runs riot over the schools of architecture that want to pull meaning away from original and individual thought and give impetus to the group. Wolfe uses much sarcasm to show that the Modernists are as guilty of conforming as those they accuse.

This book laments the loss of beaux-arts crafting and ornamentation. They are casualties because they serve the individual rather than society as a whole.

The Bauhaus draws much of its early success from "public housing projects." These buildings seem to lean toward the lowest common denominator. Promoting clean lines, the buildings also seem to promote a monotony and cheapness. Anyone who disagreed with this "groupthink" would be accused of the heinous crime of being bourgeois.

If one looks at American architecture prior to the 1980's one will see the "boxes" so loved by the modernists. How many of us have looked at the tall glass boxes in modern cities and wondered "How hard was that to design?"

Wolfe details some of the conflict between Gropius and friends who were European imports and Frank Lloyd Wright who was a truly American invention. In this book there are quite a few photographs. One of them is of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Robie House." It looks so cutting edge modern, and when I checked the date I was astonished to find that it is a hundred years old. How cool is that?

The book evolves into a philosophical and semantic discussion that loses its edge toward the end. There is some celebration of the newer generation of architects that dared defy The Silver Prince and company. Philip Johnson and Richard Meier (architect of the Getty Museum) are discussed as the young rabble rousers who defy the Modernists but still ascribe to many of their virtues.

This text is challenging. It assumes that the reader has some knowledge of architecture and architectural history. I'm fortunate in that. I teach Art History so I didn't have to struggle to make a lot of connections.

Why you see so many ugly buildings
As you drive through your city, certain blocks seem bleak, don't they? This book exposes why those ugly buildings got built. Wolfe explains the dynasty that coerced architects, company executives, and city planners into a drab simplicity with a political agenda.
While the architecture under discussion has passed, I recommend this book for activists who fight ugly real estate development in their neighborhood nests. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Poems of a Novelist
"A Stone, a Leaf, a Door" is a fascinating attempt to break the lyrical passages of Thomas Wolfe into poetic form. These short sketches are odd to say the least. Wolfe was a massive writer, in terms of his physical appearance, in terms of his ambition and scope and the simple fact that none of Wolfe's books were anything close to being short. While not all the passages fit the patterns of poetry, anyone looking to see why Wolfe was so highly regarded as a writer will find it here. Some of the poems are haunting and, best of all, there are no traces of the flat prose that Wolfe sometimes fell into. If the book does not convince you that Wolfe was a poet, it will remind you that, at his best, Thomas Wolfe could invoke lyrical passages of haunting beauty. ... Read more

Product Description
The idea for this book is so simple and obvious, its surprising that it has never been done before. Author John Griffin read Thomas Wolfe's classic, Look Homeward, Angel in college and promptly fell in love with the fictionalized Gant family. An obsession turned into a labor of love as he tracked down photos of Wolfe's real family for the better part of twenty years. The result is this beautiful book brimming with photos of Wolfe's exuberant siblings, parents, and acquaintances with accompanying passages from the novel. Griffin theorized that Wolfe may have been inspired in his writing by his own family's photo album. Wolfe's own brother Fred, confirmed this -- "As soon as Tom returned to America he came home to get the old family photo album to jog his memory of things that had happened when he was growing up. Some of the photos are described perfectly in Angel." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

IF SHE DIDN'T KNOW HIM, WHO COULD?

My hardcover copy of this Doubleday book (Book-of-the-Month edition) was printed in 1960.Elizabeth Nowell was Thomas Wolfe's literary agent at the time of his early death.She knew both Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe well, if she didn't know Thomas Wolfe who could? She spent many years not only as literary agent to Wolfe but many years his friend.

She has written a traditional biography taking us from Thomas' birth in 1900 through his life until his untimely death at age 38. She uses many quotations from his personal papers she had and also much of what Wolfe wrote of himself in his books. Not only knowing the key players in Thomas Wolfe's life but also being an active participant herself, helps bring the life of Thomas Wolfe, the writer, to life. This was a man who had to write, who said in one letter that if he couldn't he would surely explode.

Though this is a dated biography it is yet a very readable one.Elizabeth Nowell also was the editor of the letters of Thomas Wolfe. Her book remains a valuable edition concerning the life of Thomas Wolfe.

Semper Fi. ... Read more

Product Description
In the summer of 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the North Carolina mountains revising a piece about a party and subsequent fire at the Park Avenue penthouse apartment of the fictional Esther and Frederick Jack. He wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, 'I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I've ever written.' Abridged and edited versions of the story were published twice, as a novella in Scribner's Monthly (May 1939) and as part of You Can't Go Home Again (1940). Now Suzanne Stutman and John Idol have worked from manuscript sources at Harvard University to reconstruct The Party at Jack's as outlined by Wolfe before his death. Here, in its untruncated state, Wolfe's novella affords a significant glimpse of a Depression-era New York inhabited by Wall Street wheelers and dealers and the theatrical and artistic elite. Wolfe describes the Jacks and their social circle with lavish attention to mannerisms and to clothing, furnishings, and other trappings of wealth and privilege. The sharply drawn contrast between the decadence of the party-goers and the struggles of the working classes in the streets below reveals Wolfe's gifts as both a writer and a sharp social critic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

TOO complete ...
Wolfe was a genius who nevertheless NEEDED editing.The version of this novella as found in YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN is actually more finished, organic, and emotionally satisfying than the "fuller" version presented here.I also cannot help questioning some of the sentence structures in this version---some of them are very awkward or even incomprehensible;---very unlike Wolfe in the volumes he saw through the press.Again, this might be a further proof of how much benefit he derived from sensitive editing.On the whole however this is a welcome version of a very great piece of American literature because it gives us a new insight into a creative force the likes of which comes but a dozen times in a century.

Satisfying, though a draft
Stutman and Idol offer a generous and judicious working draft of an ambitious novel, some of which Wolfe's posthumous editor, Edward C. Aswell, included in his version of You Can't Go Home Again. Set in Manhattan at the zenith of the Jazz Age, the story concerns a "power couple" who exemplify the ambition, idealism, infatuations, compromise, materialism, and tragedy of a time and place that did much to define American culture. The opening chapters essay a multileveled psychological and behavioral portrait of the husband, Friederick Jack. The meditative pace, reminiscent of Goncharov or Proust, is energized by some of Wolfe's most daring and experimental writing. The main thread of the book, however, begins with Wolfe's parallel portrait of the wife, Esther Jack. The party at Jack's is her party, and Wolfe takes great pains to portray in frank detail the social, sexual, creative, and moral dichotomies revealed by the big event. You can feel Wolfe trying to work through his own conflicting emotions as he develops this work. He makes no attempt to hide his discomfort with aesthetics and lifestyles that celebrate ironic detachment or that privilege form over content. Yet just when he seems to risk a descent into merely reflexive criticism of the jazz decade, Wolfe pushes the story (through convincing plot details) into new places where it pulses with empathy and achieves transcendence. In the end, the novel is a portrait of human caring and blindness, filled with colorful details of its era. Although redundant sentences and descriptive adjectives throughout indicate the state of draft, I found it hard to put down.

i smell poop
no it's not poop, it's chicke ... Read more

Product Description
Comedy-Drama. Ketti Frings, from the novel by Thomas Wolfe. 10 m., 8 f. 2 exts. w. inset. An authentic American classic, this powerful and vital play captures the sardonic humor and the grief, both private and universal, of Wolfe's novel about a youth coming of age. Concentrating on the last third of Wolfe's story, the play vividly portrays Eugene Gant, his mother who is obsessed by her material holdings and who maintains barriers against the love of her family, the father-a stonecutter imprisoned by his failures, and the brother who never breaks away. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Critics' award as best play of the season. Liist price $6.25. (Royalty, $50-$40 from Samuel French) Slightly Restricted. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Play, Superior To The Novel On Which It Is Based
Thomas Wolfe is among my least favorite authors and his 1929 LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL is on my short list of the most overrated novels of all time--so I approached Ketti Fring's 1958 stage adaptation with extreme caution. I was astonished to find that Fring had taken Wolfe's wildly overwrought narrative and recast it as minor miracle of the stage. The novel stinks, but the play is a knockout.

The story focuses on the Gant family. W.O. and Eliza Gant are a poorly matched couple, he an alcoholic stone carver of funeral monuments, she a commonplace but greedy woman with a head for business--and the owner and operator of The Dixieland Boarding House of Altamont, North Carolina. Their unlikely mating has produced several unlikely children, with youngest son Eugene central to the drama. Quiet, intelligent, bruised by his father's all too public drunks and his mother's vulgar commercialism, Eugene finds some solace in the company of older brother Ben and later in a romance with boarding-house roomer Laura, but finds it increasingly difficult to remain in such a chaotic family nest.

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL is essentially the story of how Eugene ultimately tears free of his family to find his own way in the world--and as such it not so much plot-driven as character-driven. And the characters are very well rendered, extracted from the Wolfe novel and given a glow of life: "Fatty" Pert, a boarder in love with Ben; Madame Elizabeth, the town madam; obnoxious uncle Will Pentland; small town Dr. Maguire; and all the rest, beautifully created. It is moody, faintly nostalgic, and memorable stuff tinged with a bit of sad comedy and wistful poetry. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

one of the english language's top ten!
this book will really make you think about yourself as an american man. i am a 25 year old man who lives just 6 blocks from the "Dixieland" of Thomas Wolfe's childhood and his work can truly be a remarkable thing to read while you are sitting in the surroundings of the novels "Look Homeward, Angel" and "Of Time and the River". It is very surreal because his prose is like poetry which perfectly captures this little spot of america. i love mr. wolfe and will be reading him when i drop dead!!

This is THE great American Novel
Thomas Wolfe, never at a loss for words; in fact in he has used the entire English language to evoke what is now the lost soul of The American Male.Melancholia bathes the pages and streams into the heart of the reader, urging one on to find the forgotten spirit which blessed America before this country succumbed to its death of Soul in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is The novel, and Thomas Wolfe The writer of America's heart and soul ... Read more

Product Description
In April 1938 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, "What a time you’ve had with your sons, Max—Ernest gone to Spain, me gone to Hollywood, Tom Wolfe reverting to an artistic hill-billy." As the sole literary editor with name recognition among students of American literature, Perkins remains permanently linked to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe in literary history and literary myth. Their relationships, which were largely epistolary, play out in the 221 letters Matthew J. Bruccoli has assembled in this volume. The collection documents the extent of the fatherly forbearance, attention, and encouragement the legendary Scribners editor gave to his authorial sons. The correspondence portrays his ability to juggle the requirements of his three geniuses.

Perkins wanted his stars to be close friends and wrote to each of them about the others. They responded in kind: Fitzgerald on Hemingway and Wolfe, Wolfe on Fitzgerald, Hemingway on Wolfe and Fitzgerald. The novelists also wrote to each other. But contrary to Perkins’s hopes for a brotherhood among them, their letters express rivalry and suspicion rather than affinity. Perkins encouraged the writers professionally but never took sides in their sibling rivalries.

Addressing an overlooked aspect of literary study, the letters center on the acts of writing, editing, and publishing, and on the writers’ relationships with Scribners and one another. In addition to providing insight into the personalities of these literary heroes, the correspondence reveals how editing and publishing have changed since the twenties and thirties—a golden era for Scribners and for American literature. In particular, the letters correct the incomplete, oversimplified popular image of Perkins and his function as an editor—especially his relationship with Thomas Wolfe. ... Read more

Product Description
A study of Wolfe's four published novels, an unfinished novel and several short stories. Also includes an interview with Wolfe's boyhood pal. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Picture Perfect
An amazing collection of black and white photographs that date from 1899, 15 months before Thomas Wolfe was born, to Wolfe's funeral, 1938.Each photograph includes a caption, and most are dated.The captions helped me identify dates and descriptions for the online photos that I have viewed.

In addition to Thomas Wolfe and his family, the photographs include:
· Exterior and interior views of the Old Kentucky Home, including the porch where Eugene slept during the summer of his first love, the windows to the second-story porch that face the window of the adjacent room where Laura James slept, the bedroom where Eugene and Laura made love.
· Exterior views of Wolfe's residences while at Harvard University and during his stays in New York.
· The Olin Dow's family mansion in Rhinebeck, NY, referred to as Far Field Farm in "Of Time and the River".
· The ledgers purchased for Wolfe by Aline Berstein and dust jackets for the first edition of "Look Homeward, Angel", "Of Time and the River", "From Death to Morning", and "The Story of a Novel".
· Wolfe's first trip west and last trip to Europe, his return to Ashville in 1937, his last months in New York, and last trip to the West in 1938.

The books ends with photos of the last clear picture taken of him; the Firlawns Sanatorium in Kenmore, Washington; Providence Hospital, where Wolfe was a patient from August 6 to September 5, 1938; and the Wolfe family plot at Riverside Cemetery. ... Read more

Product Description
The Four Lost Men is the first publication of the long version of Thomas Wolfe's story of familial and national reflection set during World War I. Here Wolfe supplies a moving portrait of his dying father, as well as a rich meditation on American history and ambitions. Discussion of the title characters--Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes--provides Wolfe an opportunity to assess the mood and promise of the nation and to reflect on the obstacles toward untapped American potential.

Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, the four Republican presidents who followed Grant during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, were all Civil War generals and self-made men, though none experienced a distinguished term in office. These presidents are iconic figures in the recollections and political monologues of the teenaged narrator's dying father. In his efforts to understand their importance to his father, the boy comes to appreciate the act of storytelling that redefines these men in his father's memory and in turn redefines the father in the narrator's memory.

Originally published as a short story of seven thousand words in Scribner's Magazine in 1934--and later abridged by one thousand words for republication in the 1935 anthology From Death to Morning--Wolfe's expanded tale is published here for the first time in its full length of some twenty-one thousand words. Editors Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli have employed the same methods to reestablish this text as they used in their centennial edition of O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, the unabridged version of Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. The reestablishment of the long version of The Four Lost Men opens an undeveloped area of scholarship on Wolfe's short fiction and serves as a model for restoring other such works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A recommended consideration for any community or college library collection of enduring literary works
Thomas Wolfe's literary classic "The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version" was published as a short story in 1934, with a length of only seven thousand words. Now republished with a literary critique from Arlyn & Matthew J. Bruccolli, the story sports a full length of well over twenty thousand words. A story set in the days of World War I with characters such as four 19th Century presidents, it's a tale sure to please readers of any era. "The Four Lost Men" is a recommended consideration for any community or college library collection of enduring literary works.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

See 'O'Lost:"....original Homeward Angel
Correction-- treatment on Wolfe, is 330 pages. Read this,then collect..for posterity,l of theUS greatestO'Lost" over 750 pages, (20000) ..also edited by Mat Bruccoli,foremost scholar on.Wolfe'sm/s...for & about Asheville's....hero-novelist who they thought was...at that time..as if he were"Dr.Hunter S. Thompson" ... Read more