American author Thomas Wolfe's status in American literature was at a high level in 1960. That year, when Wolfe was profiled for the University of Minnesota's "Pamphlets on American Writers" series, the pamphlet about his life and work was number 6. The first 5 writers had huge reputations in 1960, and still do today: Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Henry James, and Mark Twain. While the numbering of the pamphlets is not meant to suggest a strict numerical ranking, the fact that Thomas Wolfe was number 6, as opposed to number 60, tells us something about the fine standing he enjoyed in 1960.
Wolfe's critical standing has slipped since then. None of his novels were chosen for the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels written in English during the 20th century. The UK newspaper The Guardian made a splash recently with their list of the 100 Best Novels of all-time, and not only was Wolfe not on the list, none of his 4 novels received any votes from any of the 172 experts surveyed. Those of us who know and love Wolfe’s writing can appreciate his unique voice—he was an American original. To put it simply, I read Thomas Wolfe because there’s something in his writing that I can’t find anywhere else in literature.
I attended, and spoke at, the annual meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Society last week in Wolfe's hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, and it was a pleasure to chat with so many fellow Wolfeans. There will always be an audience for Wolfe's style, even if it has gone out of critical favor.
The author of the pamphlet on Thomas Wolfe was C. Hugh Holman, who edited The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe and The Thomas Wolfe Reader. As much as Holman obviously admired Wolfe's work, he also critiqued Wolfe as well. At the end of the pamphlet, Holman writes that Wolfe's work had "an intensity and a beauty of language unsurpassed by any other American prose writer," but he also adds that Wolfe's novels contain "passages of very bad writing and of irrelevant action." (p.43)
Holman does an excellent job outlining Wolfe's life and fiction in only 45 pages. One of the quotes that struck me the most was in a letter Wolfe wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1930: "I believe I am at last beginning to have a proper use of a writer's material: for it seems to me he ought to see in what has happened to him the elements of the universal experience." (p.25) I think Wolfe hit the nail on the head—what a writer chooses to write about will invariably be colored by their own autobiographical experience, but in order to craft something successful, they must be able to connect it to a larger whole.
Holman writes about how in Wolfe's work "this vision of man possessed of tragic grandeur—essentially the vision of the nineteenth-century Romantic—is presented with great intensity." (p.41) I read that and nodded my head in agreement. And the quote made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both Wolfe and Fitzgerald were Romantics, with a capital R. The idea of tragic grandeur reminded me of this quote from a letter Fitzgerald wrote: "I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur." Leading Fitzgerald and Wolfe scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli titled his biography of Fitzgerald Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Both Wolfe and Fitzgerald saw the individual in heroic terms. Both men had little use for most of the institutions of modern society: government, the military, business, organized religion, but they did not allow their dismissal of these institutions to turn into a bitter cynicism. There was still a Romantic optimism that the individual might be able to transcend this sordid plane of existence, if only for a brief, fleeting moment.
Holman's pamphlet on Thomas Wolfe is an insightful study into this great American author.
