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A Life of Thomas Wolfe
Harvard University Press
February 2003
On Sale: January 20, 2003
608 pages
ISBN: 0674008693
EAN: 9780674008694
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century
American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of
our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his
passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered
something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow
of prose was shaped into novels by his editor, the
celebrated Maxwell Perkins. In this definitive and
compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David
Herbert Donald dismantles that myth and demonstrates that
Wolfe was a boldly aware experimental artist who, like James
Joyce, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, deliberately
pushed at the boundaries of the modern novel. Donald takes a
new measure of this complex, tormented man as he reveals
Wolfe's difficult childhood, when he was buffeted between an
alcoholic father and a resentful mother; his "magical" years
at the University of North Carolina, where his writing
talent first flourished; his rise to literary fame after
repeated rejection; and the full story of Wolfe's passionate
affair with Aline Bernstein, including their intimate
letters. "Supersedes all previous Wolfe biographies in
illuminating detail, in empathy for its complex unhappy
subject, in sympathy for what he wanted to do, and what he
did, as a writer, and in its own literary distinction ... A
work of great subtlety and sophistication." --Washington
Post Book World
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