Volume 10, Number 9 · May 9, 1968
Wolfe Hunting
By Jean Stafford
Thomas Wolfe, A Biography
by Andrew Turnbull
Scribners, 258 pp., $7.95
The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother
edited by C. Hugh Holman, edited by Sue Fields Ross
North Carolina, 368 pp., $8.50
At about the time Andrew Turnbull's biography of Thomas Wolfe came out, I asked the students of a graduate class in creative writing if they had read Wolfe, and I was surprised at how many of them had. I had supposed that he had been consigned—as he was in my own mind—to the annals of the Thirties in which were interred other quaint phenomena like the Dionne quintuplets and 3.2 beer. I myself read him reverently (and like most of the people who were reading him at the time regarded the one-line psalm in Look Homeward, Angel, 'O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again,' as one of the most beautiful melodies in English) in 1934 in Boulder, Colorado, but by the summer of 1935 my heart no longer palpitated at the nacreous light of dawn upon the hills of the Tar Heel State or at Eugene Gant's Parnassian asides; and when Wolfe came to my home town that summer to talk at the University of Colorado Writer's Conference, I did not go to hear him even though I had a minor clerical job with the Conference and could have got in free.
Review, 3316 words
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