Book Review: The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Francis E. Skipp, Foreword by James Dickey (1987)

Paperback cover of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Thomas Wolfe was not known as a short story writer. Wolfe is most famous for his four mammoth novels, two published during his lifetime, and two published posthumously. However, he did publish many short stories, and the 1987 collection The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, assembles all 58 stories in one volume. Many of Wolfe’s stories later appeared as episodes in his novels.  

The book was edited by Francis E. Skipp, who taught literature at the University of Miami for 30 years. Skipp’s obituary says that he was an expert on Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and James Dickey, who wrote the Foreword for the book. Dickey, who taught at the University of South Carolina for many years, was renowned as a poet and the author of the novel Deliverance.  

Skipp details the difficult process of assembling the different drafts of Wolfe’s stories and figuring out when changes were made by Wolfe himself, and when they were made by editors. Skipp has tried, I think rightly so, to keep the stories as close to what Wolfe himself wanted, which often means keeping extra material in the stories. I wish that Skipp presented the reader with more information about where and when these short stories were originally published. Fortunately, you can now find this information on the website of the Thomas Wolfe Society.  

Dickey’s Foreword is a marvelous defense and celebration of Wolfe’s writing. Dickey quotes three paragraphs from Wolfe’s short story “The Four Lost Men,” and Dickey writes of those paragraphs: “This is what you read Thomas Wolfe for: complete immersion in a scene, imaginative surrender to whatever a situation or a memory evokes; quite simply, the sense of life submitted to and entered. In everything he wrote, Wolfe tells us that we have settled—are settling—for too little. We have not lived enough; we are capable of more.” (p xiv-xv)  

Much of Wolfe’s fiction was autobiographical in nature, but The Complete Short Stories also demonstrates how Wolfe was able to create fiction that featured characters and situations very different from his own. One of my favorite stories in the book was “Polyphemus,” a five-page story about a Spanish explorer seeing the North American coast in the 1600’s. It’s about European imperialism, and how the Spaniard is blind to the treasure of America because the streets are not paved with gold.  

Wolfe’s writing was full of beautiful lyricism. Wolfe’s publisher was Scribner’s, and his editor was Maxwell Perkins. Wolfe was one of a trio of great American writers Scribner’s had at that time, the others being F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. You can put these three writers on a continuum. At one end, you have the terse sentences and minimalism of Ernest Hemingway. (Although Hemingway also wrote sentences that went on and on and on, like the famous sentences at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms.) At the other end of the continuum, you have the maximalism and the powerful flood of words unleashed by Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s enthusiasm and passion for life spilled forth in his writing in long paragraphs of description. And in the middle, you would have the exquisite, beautiful sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was more descriptive than Hemingway, but his prose was leaner than Wolfe’s. These three writers are proof that great writing cannot be contained in just one model, or one mode of expression. Fitzgerald is my personal favorite of the three writers, but there are things I get from Wolfe and Hemingway’s writing that I don’t get from Fitzgerald’s.  

“The Lost Boy” is one of my favorite stories of Wolfe’s. It’s about Wolfe’s older brother Grover, who died of typhoid at the age of 12. It’s a beautiful and haunting meditation on time, memory, and grief. Written in several different voices, it demonstrates Wolfe’s powers at their full display. The final section is narrated by Grover’s younger brother, essentially Thomas Wolfe himself. Wolfe went to the rented house in St. Louis where Grover died, to see as an adult the room where his brother died so many years ago. Here is the second to last paragraph of the story: 

“I knew that I would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again, and that the light that came, that passed and went and that returned again, the memory of lost voices in the hills, cloud shadows passing in the mountains, the voices of our kinsmen long ago, the street, the heat, King’s Highway, and the piper’s son, the vast and drowsy murmur of the distant Fair—oh, strange and bitter miracle of Time—come back again.” (p.380) 

Similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe felt a constant sense of time’s passage, and the irrecoverable nature of the past. There is a longing that is a constant presence in both men’s writing.  

But Wolfe was not always melancholy, and his exuberant prose is a joy to read, like this sentence from “The Train and the City”: “Suddenly the streets were bursting into life again, they foamed and glittered with a million points of life and color, and women more beautiful than flowers, more full of juice and succulence than fruit, appeared upon them in a living tide of love and beauty.” (p.11) 

One of Wolfe’s finest stories was “No Door.” The story was so long that it was published as two stories, “No Door” and “The House of the Far and Lost.” There’s a beautiful paragraph about October in “No Door” that is one of my favorites. 

“October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to the massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow, and delight. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, and ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollinated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all men who were returning and for all those who were gone and would not come again.” (p.79) 

Wow. That’s just a showstopper of a paragraph, showing off the ways in which Wolfe could paint a picture with his words.  

There are other memorable stories in the book, like “Oktoberfest,” which I wrote about here.  

My favorite 12 stories from The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe are: 

The Train and the City 

Death the Proud Brother 

No Door 

The Four Lost Men 

The House of the Far and Lost 

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn 

Polyphemus 

Oktoberfest 

The Child by Tiger 

The Lost Boy 

The Dark Messiah/The Spanish Letter (a story about Wolfe’s disillusion with Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. The story “The Dark Messiah” was assembled by Edward Aswell after Wolfe’s death, the material was taken from “The Spanish Letter”) 

The Return of the Prodigal (about Wolfe’s return to his hometown of Asheville in 1937, after seven years away) 

I would recommend The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe to fans of Wolfe’s writing, or to anyone interested in American literature. During his abbreviated career, Thomas Wolfe produced a lot of great writing.