![]() Thomas Wolfe, the last child, had seven siblings, one of whom, his brother Grover, would die at the age of ten. In Asheville there were also “lungers,” since the mountain air was felt to be helpful for the victims of tuberculosis. To these useful items of commerce, Thomas Wolfe’s mother added a shabby rooming house that went by the name of “The Old Kentucky Home,” translated to “Dixieland” in Look Homeward, Angel. There were also rather grand hotels with suitable accommodations for well-to-do travelers. ![]() The mountain air attracted tourists, among them George Vanderbilt, who built there one of those monuments to the imagination or lack of it, a “château” of 125 rooms which he named Biltmore. Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, a pleasant small city in the Great Smokies. And with all this, a Southerner-there was that clinging to him also. Himself, every step of his journey, his family, that turbulent crowd of folks from which he came, each passage on a train, each face met on the way, landscape, voices, a thousand vignettes, history, memory uncanny, language at hand like water flowing down a stream. Hunger for experience, for escape, for fame. Hunger, another word that dots the pages. Lost, o lost, he cries out again and again. He was vain in the belief in his talents, and insecure, unsteady in the manner of a refugee who has traveled far from the home that formed his being. ![]() As a writer, he became a statistic of extremity. A prodigious drinker and brawler, sleepless to produce the pages that arrived at the publisher in a crate, or so it was said. Six feet four-and- a-half inches tall awkward, handsome, impressive, and intimidating. He was outsize in every respect hugeness is his dominating iconography. While traveling out west he was taken very ill with pneumonia and, symptoms unabating, was transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he died of a tubercular lesion to the brain. ![]() Thomas Wolfe died at the age of thirty-eight. We can read that to accommodate the excisions he would often write transitional passages of greater length than the matter deleted. Thomas Wolfe was anxious but not modest about the gift to write the lines that made up his mountains of pages. #SLEEPLESS TOWN TORRENT PROFESSIONAL#Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others who came under his care? Maxwell Perkins was modest about the professional duty or privilege to draw a pencil through one line or thousands. Maxwell Perkins, “Editor of Genius,” as his biographer names him with some unintended obscurity: is the editor a genius or are we alerted to Ernest Hemingway, F. Sometimes Thomas Wolfe seems to belong to editorial history rather than to the annals of American literature. ![]() Gone with the Wind (1936) had 1,037 pages.” “With the same typography and design as the 626-page Look Homeward, Angel, it would have made a book of about 825 pages-not impossible to publish in one volume, as this edition demonstrates. There is disagreement about the number of words eliminated by Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner’s-was it 90,000 words or a mere 66,000? The editors of O Lost have toiled over word counts, common typographical errors, spacings, and so on, and have come up with some interesting numbers. The moment is honored by an exhibition at the New York Public Library, a celebration at the University of North Carolina, and by the publication of the original typescript of O Lost, the title that became Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s first book. Thus the year marks his centennial, along with that of a few others, including Louis Armstrong. Thomas Wolfe, were he living today, would be a hundred years old. I’ve been cutting like mad since it came and have got it down to ten thousand and a half by cutting very stringently. On the matter of a manuscript written by Thomas Wolfe, we find his agent busy at work. ![]()
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