Book Review: The Autobiography of an American Novelist, by Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Leslie Field (1983)

The oddly designed paperback cover of The Autobiography of an American Novelist, by Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Leslie Field, 1983. Why so much blank space? (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938.

Thomas Wolfe’s untimely death in 1938, at the age of 37, stilled the voice of one of America’s leading writers of fiction. Although Wolfe only published two novels during his lifetime, he left behind enough material that two more novels were published posthumously. Wolfe’s 1936 book The Story of a Novel detailed the writing and editing process of Wolfe’s mammoth second novel, Of Time and the River, published in 1935.  

The 1983 book The Autobiography of an American Novelist collects The Story of a Novel and “Writing and Living,” a May 1938 speech that Wolfe delivered at Purdue University that proved to be his final public speech before his death in September of 1938. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, as Wolfe doesn’t recount his entire life story. If you want to read Thomas Wolfe’s autobiography, go read his novels.  

The Story of a Novel tells us how Wolfe found it difficult to follow up the success of his first novel, 1929’s Look Homeward, Angel. A popular and critical success, Wolfe’s first novel thrust him into the position of “the next great American novelist,” the same position F. Scott Fitzgerald had occupied at the beginning of the 1920’s, and Ernest Hemingway had occupied in the middle of the decade.  

Wolfe was taken aback at the negative reaction in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to Look Homeward, Angel. Note for authors: people generally do not like to see themselves portrayed in novels. It makes me wonder if there’s been a novel that was instantly embraced by the people of the real town portrayed in the novel?  

As Wolfe found out, sometimes success can be as hard to deal with as failure. And because Look Homeward, Angel was a success, now there were lofty expectations upon him. The longer it took for Wolfe to publish a second novel, the louder the murmurs were that he was “just a one book author,” that he had said all he had to say with his first novel.  

To counter the critics, Wolfe kept writing. And writing and writing. He eventually delivered a manuscript to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners in a giant crate. Wolfe estimated the manuscript was about 2 million words long. (p.58) Or about 4 times as long as War and Peace. Wolfe had written 100,000 words just about a train journey across Virginia. (p.76) That’s about twice the length of The Great Gatsby.  

Maxwell Perkins must have been a pretty amazing person to deal with his three star authors: Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Any one of those geniuses would be enough for most people to handle. Perkins helped Wolfe transform his massive manuscript into Of Time and the River. Perkins goes unnamed in The Story of a Novel, but of course modern readers know he’s the editor to whom Wolfe is referring.  

I think Wolfe honestly depicted the editing process of his manuscript in The Story of a Novel. It was a true collaboration between Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins. However, after The Story of a Novel was released, it became the subject of a scathing take down by critic Bernard DeVoto. In a piece titled “Genius is Not Enough,” published in the Saturday Review of Literature, DeVoto attacked Wolfe, charging that the writer was overly dependent on Perkins’ help.  

DeVoto described Wolfe’s “incompleteness,” charging that “one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins.” DeVoto wrote that it was not enough to be a genius when it came to writing novels, “it must be supported by an ability to impart shape to material, simple competence in the use of tools.” (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, p.295-6)  

Wolfe was deeply wounded by DeVoto’s blistering personal attack, and it was a key factor in Wolfe’s eventual break with Perkins. I think DeVoto’s criticism was worthless and cruel. However much Maxwell Perkins helped Wolfe in editing the book, the words on the page were still Wolfe’s, and Wolfe’s alone. Perkins helped in the arrangements of those words, but the words were Wolfe’s. DeVoto portrayed Wolfe as a kind of idiot savant, smart enough to write the words, but not smart enough to put them in the right order.  

I think Wolfe was honest in writing The Story of a Novel, but DeVoto then used that honesty against him, as though Wolfe’s struggle with the raw material of the novel was something to be ashamed of. In a way, DeVoto’s attack on Wolfe was an attack on Wolfe’s masculinity. DeVoto was advocating for a type of literature based on rugged individualism, where an author shouldn’t need the editor’s help to put things together. The editor should just correct spelling errors. But Wolfe was admitting that he needed help, and there’s no shame in that.  

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe touches on what it meant to be a boy growing up in Asheville, North Carolina who wanted to be an author. “I may have thought that it would be a fine thing to be a writer because a writer was a man like Lord Byron or Lord Tennyson or Longfellow or Percy Bysshe Shelley. A writer was a man who was far away like these people I have mentioned...it seemed to me that a writer was a man from a kind of remote and unknowable people that I could never approach.” (p.5) I was struck by that quote, and thinking about how Wolfe didn’t have a role model for the kind of writer he would become. He had to make his own way and forge his own path.  

In “Writing and Living,” Wolfe wrote of Look Homeward, Angel: “It is what is called an autobiographical novel—a definition with which I have never agreed, simply because it seems to me every novel, every piece of creative writing that anyone can do, is autobiographical.” (p.120) 

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe wrote: “It is literally impossible for a man who has the stuff of creation in him to make a literal transcription of his own experience. Everything in a work of art is changed and transfigured by the personality of the artist.” (p.20) 

I like these two ideas of Wolfe’s: that creative writing may draw its spark or inspiration from real life, but that it is inevitably changed and altered by the artist through the creative process. And whatever you choose to write about is autobiographical because it inevitably reveals something about your personality.  

Wolfe name-checked F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Writing and Living,” and although Wolfe didn’t say anything about Fitzgerald’s writing, I took it as a sign of respect that Fitzgerald was one of the few authors mentioned by name in “Writing and Living.” Although they were very different stylists, I think Wolfe and Fitzgerald respected each other’s talent.  

There is an inevitable sadness in “Writing and Living,” as Wolfe writes of “the cycle of my thirty-seven years,” and the reader knows that he will not make it to thirty-eight. (p.145) Wolfe was putting a period on this cycle of his creative life. “The circle ends full swing: this period of every man—a phrase in the great lexicon of what all living in the cycle now is ended, and I say farewell...I know now that you can’t go home again.” (p.152) 

“Writing and Living” ends with the word “hope,” as Wolfe described charting a new course into a new phase of his creative life, but sadly he didn’t have time to fully explore this new land. The Autobiography of an American Novelist, imperfect as its title may be, is still a fascinating look at a man who devoted his energies to the creative life.