Of Time and the River

In the opinion of many, Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser were two of the finest writers to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century. Dreiser interpreted contemporary events and spun them into finely crafted novels that painted a complete picture of American life in the times he lived. Wolfe, on the other hand, was a less effective story teller, but a wonderfully expressive writer--a true wordsmith from the North Carolina hills whose emotional intensity explodes in every well-turned phrase. It is said that he could never have become the literary spokesman for the disaffected generation of college writers coming of age during the Depression without the firm and guiding hand of Maxwell Perkins, his faithful editor nursing him past the troubling demons of his personal life. However, I have to wonder if Perkins caused irreparable harm by excising too much material. The recently published Starwick chapters which were purged from the original manuscript by Perkins in 1934, show the young novelist at his very best. One wonders just how much better this literary masterpiece would have been, if Wolfe's original draft (which they say filled a box the size of a coffin) had been left alone. Thomas Wolfe's passing at so young an age created a terrible void in American letters, but he inspired thousands of idealistic but unpublished authors to pursue their craft with the same mystic that he poured into every paragraph and every phrase of these majestic novels and short stories.

Even if you never slog all the way through this tome, you owe it to yourself to thumb through until you reach Wolfe's vivid descriptions of the following: 1. His fertile imagination fixing on small town life as his train rolls from his hometown up to Harvard 2. His description of the state of mind and body of the old men in the club car, playing cards and waxing philosophic in their cocoon of smoke and upholstered comfort 3. His self transfer into the still strong mind and emaciated body of his dying father. 4. The train. There is always the train. Behemoth. Chariot to freedom. Iron Leviathan. Taking him away from Ashmont, clinging love, bitter memory, clay, dust, dirt, flower, self. If there is any more skillful recreator of all these elements, all of these forces, in our own beings, from any age ... in any language ... please, please ... let me know