Thomas Wolfe Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
  2. Of Time and the River (1935)
  3. The Web and the Rock (1938)
  4. You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)
  5. Good Child’s River (1991)
  6. O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (2000)
  7. The Web and the Root (2009)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Lost Boy (1937)
  2. Mountains (1970)
  3. Welcome to Our City (1983)
  4. Mannerhouse (1985)
  5. The Good Child’s River (1991)
  6. The Starwick Episodes (1994)
  7. The Party At Jack’s (1995)
  8. The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version (2008)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. From Death to Morning (1935)
  2. The Hills Beyond (1941)
  3. A Stone, a Leaf, a Door (1945)
  4. Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (1961)
  5. The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe (1987)
  6. Thomas Wolfe’s Civil War (2004)
  7. Windows of the Heart (2007)
  8. The Magical Campus (2008)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Story of a Novel (1936)
  2. A Western Journal a Daily Log the Great Parks Trip (1968)
  3. The Autobiography of an American Novelist (1983)
  4. My Other Loneliness (1983)
  5. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (1984)
  6. To Loot My Life Clean (2000)
  7. The Face of a Nation 1939 (2021)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. 50 Great Short Stories (1952)

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Thomas Wolfe Books Overview

Look Homeward, Angel

The stunning, classic coming of age novel written by one of America’s foremost Southern writers A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man’s burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy. The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is ‘a book made out of my life,’ and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today’s most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader.

Of Time and the River

The sequel to Thomas Wolfe’s remarkable first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River is one of the great classics of American literature. The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe’s autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer. The work of an exceptionally expressive writer of fertile imagination and startling emotional intensity, Of Time and the River illuminates universal truths about art and life, city and country, past and present. It is a novel that is majestic and enduring. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, ‘It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life.’ This edition, published in celebration of Wolfe’s centennial anniversary, contains a new introduction by Pat Conroy.

You Can’t Go Home Again

With an Introduction by Gail Godwin A twentieth century classic, Thomas Wolfe’s magnificent novel is both the story of a young writer longing to make his mark upon the world and a sweeping portrait of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the years leading up to World War II. Upon the publication of You Can t Go Home Again in 1940, two years after Wolfe s death, The New York Times Book Review declared that it will stand apart from everything else that he wrote because this is the book of a man who had come to terms with himself, who was on his way to mastery of his art, who had something profoundly important to say. Driven by dreams of literary success, George Webber has left his provincial hometown to make his name as a writer in New York City. When his first novel is published, it brings him the fame he has sought, but it also brings the censure of his neighbors back home, who are outraged by his depiction of them. Unsettled by their reaction and unsure of himself and his future, Webber begins a search for a greater understanding of his artistic identity that takes him deep into New York s hectic social whirl; to London with an uninhibited group of expatriates; and to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler s shadow. He discovers a world plagued by political uncertainty and on the brink of transformation, yet he finds within himself the capacity to meet it with optimism and a renewed love for his birthplace. He is a changed man yet a hopeful one, awake to the knowledge that one can never fully go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…
away from all the strife and conflict of the world…
back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.

Good Child’s River

For the last eight years of his life, Thomas Wolfe worked periodically on a series of chapters that were part of a huge work in progress. The work was based loosely on the early life of New York stage and costume designer Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was engaged in a tempestuous love affair for eleven years. In her introduction, Suzanne Stutman points out that publication of this novel should finally lay to rest the myth that Wolfe could write only about himself. Although some sections of this work were heavily edited and published after Wolfe’s death, The Good Child’s River, as Wolfe wrote it, was not published until 1991 and is now available in paperback for the first time.

O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life

An unabridged version of ‘Look Homeward, Angel’. On original publication 66,000 words were omitted for reasons of propriety and publishing economics, using the carbon copy of the original typescript, the Bruccolis have established the original text.

The Web and the Root

Shortly before his death at a tragically young age, author Thomas Wolfe presented his editor with an epic masterwork that was subsequently published as three separate novels: You Can’t Go Home Again, The Hills Beyond, and The Web and the Rock. The Web and the Root features the three initial sections of the The Web and the Rock, widely considered to be the book’s strongest material. A prequel to You Can’t Go Home Again, it is the story of George Webber’s momentous journey from Libya Falls, North Carolina, to the Golden City of the North offering vivid, sometimes cutting depictions of rural pleasures and small town clannishness while exploring boundless urban possibility and the complex, violent undercurrents of the metropolis.

The Good Child’s River

For the last eight years of his life, Thomas Wolfe worked periodically on a series of chapters that were part of a huge work in progress. The work was based loosely on the early life of New York stage and costume designer Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was engaged in a tempestuous love affair for eleven years. In her introduction, Suzanne Stutman points out that publication of this novel should finally lay to rest the myth that Wolfe could write only about himself. Although some sections of this work were heavily edited and published after Wolfe’s death, The Good Child’s River, as Wolfe wrote it, was not published until 1991 and is now available in paperback for the first time.

The Starwick Episodes

One of the most enduring characters in Thomas Wolfe’s fiction is Francis Starwick, the midwestern aesthete who befriends Eugene Gant at Harvard in Wolfe’s second autobiographical novel, Of Time and the River. In the process of organizing Wolfe’s massive manuscript for publication, however, editor Maxwell Perkins deleted some of the analyses of Starwick’s behavior and several of the episodes involving Eugene and Starwick. The result was that the relationship between the two young men was not as fully developed as Wolfe had originally planned. Richard S. Kennedy discovered these excised passages among the Wolfe papers at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. In The Starwick Episodes he has arranged them sequentially and indicated their position in the original manuscript. In one of them Starwick introduces Eugene to Joyce’s Ulysses, and in another he takes him to view the paintings in Boston’s Museum of Fine arts. Additional scenes find the two exploring the lower depths of Paris until at length their true sexual natures are revealed in a visit to a Parsian brothel. Kennedy’s research also uncovered the story of the life of Kenneth Raisbeck, the young man whom Wolfe used as the starting point for his fictional creation of Starwick. In his Introduction, Kennedy describes Raisbeck’s career, both its brilliant promise and its tragic end, and his similarity to the character in the novel.

The Party At Jack’s

In the summer of 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the North Carolina mountains revising a piece about a party and subsequent fire at the Park Avenue penthouse apartment of the fictional Esther and Frederick Jack. He wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, ‘I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I’ve ever written.’ Abridged and edited versions of the story were published twice, as a novella in Scribner’s Monthly May 1939 and as part of You Can’t Go Home Again 1940. Now Suzanne Stutman and John Idol have worked from manuscript sources at Harvard University to reconstruct The Party At Jack’s as outlined by Wolfe before his death. Here, in its untruncated state, Wolfe’s novella affords a significant glimpse of a Depression era New York inhabited by Wall Street wheelers and dealers and the theatrical and artistic elite. Wolfe describes the Jacks and their social circle with lavish attention to mannerisms and to clothing, furnishings, and other trappings of wealth and privilege. The sharply drawn contrast between the decadence of the party goers and the struggles of the working clas*ses in the streets below reveals Wolfe’s gifts as both a writer and a sharp social critic.

The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version

The Four Lost Men is the first publication of the long version of Thomas Wolfe’s story of familial and national reflection set during World War I. Here Wolfe supplies a moving portrait of his dying father, as well as a rich meditation on American history and ambitions. Discussion of the title characters Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes provides Wolfe an opportunity to as*sess the mood and promise of the nation and to reflect on the obstacles toward untapped American potential. Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, the four Republican presidents who followed Grant during the Reconstruction and post Reconstruction eras, were all Civil War generals and self made men, though none experienced a distinguished term in office. These presidents are iconic figures in the recollections and political monologues of the teenaged narrator’s dying father. In his efforts to understand their importance to his father, the boy comes to appreciate the act of storytelling that redefines these men in his father’s memory and in turn redefines the father in the narrator’s memory. Originally published as a short story of seven thousand words in Scribner’s Magazine in 1934 and later abridged by one thousand words for republication in the 1935 anthology From Death to Morning Wolfe’s expanded tale is published here for the first time in its full length of some twenty one thousand words. Editors Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli have employed the same methods to reestablish this text as they used in their centennial edition of O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, the unabridged version of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. The reestablishment of the long version of The Four Lost Men opens an undeveloped area of scholarship on Wolfe’s short fiction and serves as a model for restoring other such works.

The Hills Beyond

This wonderful and compelling collection of stories and character sketches contains some of the finest Wolfe ever wrote.

The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe

The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe‘ stands as the most comprehensive edition of Thomas Wolfe’s short fiction to date. Collected by Francis E. Skipp, these fifty eight stories span the breadth of Thomas Wolfe’s career, from hte uninhibited young writer meticulously describing the enchanting birth of springtime in ‘The Train and the City’ to his mature, sober account of a terrible lynching in ‘The Child by Tiger’. Thirty five of these stories have never before been collected, and ‘The Spanish Letter’ is published here for the first time. Vital, compassionate, remarkably attuned to character, scene, and social context, ‘The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe‘ represents the last work we have from the author of ‘Look Homeward’, ‘Angel’, who was considered ‘the most promising writer of his generation’ The New York Times.

Thomas Wolfe’s Civil War

This collection of Thomas Wolfe’s writings demonstrates the centrality of the Civil War to Wolfe’s literary concerns and identity. From Look Homeward, Angel to The Hills Beyond and The Web and the Rock, Wolfe perpetually returned to the themes of loss, dissolution, sorrow, and romance engendered in the minds of many southerners by the Civil War and its lingering aftermath. His characters reflect time and again on Civil War heroes and dwell on ghostlike memories handed down by their mothers, fathers, and grandfathers. Wolfe and his protagonists compare their contemporary southern landscape to visions they have conjured of its appearance before and during the war, thereby merging the past with the present in an intense way. Ultimately, Wolfe’s prose style – incantatory and rhapsodic – is designed to evoke the national tragedy on an emotional level. Selections of Wolfe’s writings in this collection include short stories ‘Chickamauga,’ ‘Four Lost Men,’ ‘The Plumed Knight’, excerpts from his novels O Lost, the restored version of Look Homeward, Angel, The Hills Beyond, and Of Time and the River and a play, Mannerhouse, edited and introduced by David Madden. Madden, who makes the provocative claim that everything a southern writer writes derives from the Civil War experience, also highlights many issues essential to understanding Wolfe’s absorption with the Civil War.

Windows of the Heart

Thomas Wolfe remains one of the least understood of the major twentieth century American writers, but his relationship with his most influential teacher sheds new light on his creative genius and on the nurture of creativity in general. Edited by Ted Mitchell, Windows of the Heart collects seventy five letters exchanged between Wolfe and Margaret Roberts, the grade school teacher he called ‘the mother of my spirit,’ and follows the ebb and flow of their complex relationship. By turns encouraging, revealing, and painful, their letters document one of the most important forces in the novelist’s life. When Wolfe entered a writing contest at age eleven, Roberts easily identified the young boy’s literary potential. From that moment forward she became his most ardent supporter. His teacher for four years, she awakened in him a love for fine literature and a belief in his abilities. Wolfe later described the years under her tutelage as ‘the happiest and most valuable years of my life.’Published for the first time in their entirety and supplemented with forty two photographs, the letters between teacher and student portray Roberts’s significance to Wolfe and provide important clues to his process of fictionalization. Wolfe confides to Roberts as he can to no one else about fame, his writing, his life, his affair with Aline Bernstein, and his interactions with editor Maxwell Perkins. Their correspondence builds to the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. After seventeen years of an intense and loving relationship, Roberts feels betrayed by the novel’s satiric portrayal of her husband and his family. Their communication stops for seven years, but in a testament to her love for Wolfe, Roberts eventually reinitiates a correspondence that lasts until his death. In addition to Mitchell’s insightful introduction, the letters are augmented by a foreword from Matthew J. Bruccoli, a leading authority on the House of Scribner and its authors.

The Magical Campus

Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Aldo P. Magi, The Magical Campus collects for the first time Thomas Wolfe’s earliest published work including poems, plays, short fiction, news articles, and essays both signed and unsigned, assembled in chronological order. Wolfe began his collegiate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1916, when he was fifteen, with a freshman year marked by obscurity and loneliness. By his junior year he had emerged as a recognized and popular figure in campus life, a participant in organizations, clubs, and fraternities as well as the editor of several student publications. He began in these apprenticeship years his ascendancy to iconic literary status. Included in The Magical Campus is Wolfe’s first published work, the poem ‘A Field in Flanders’ from the November 1917 issue of the Magazine. Here too is the poem ‘The Challenge,’ Wolfe’s first piece to be reprinted off campus, in his hometown newspaper and elsewhere across the Southeast. ‘A Cullenden of Virginia’ represents his inaugural foray into published fiction; and his folk plays, such as The Return of Buck Gavin and Deferred Payment, mark the start of his unrealized ambitions to be a playwright. Though they lack the sophistication and scale of the grand fictions that now define Wolfe’s place in literature, these and others of his student publications testify to the potential he had tapped into through instruction and encouragement at Chapel Hill.

To Loot My Life Clean

The relationship between Thomas Wolfe and his editor, Maxwell Perkins has been the subject of guesswork and anecdote for 70 years. Scholars have debated Wolfe’s dependence on his editor. This volume of 251 letters should clarify the relationship and set the record straight.

50 Great Short Stories

50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world s fiction.

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