Independent scholar Joanne Marshall Mauldin examines in day-by-day detail the final two years of novelist Thomas Wolfe’s life, beginning with his return, in the summer of 1936, to his Asheville, N.C., hometown.
He and his editor Maxwell Perkins had mistakenly envisioned this as a period of writing and rest. But Wolfe, an outsized man with an inexhaustible hunger for food, alcohol and whatever pulsed with life, brought the whirlwind with him. He had not visited Asheville since the 1929 publication of “Look Homeward, Angel,” in which his thinly disguised portraits of townsfolk had created an uproar. His mountain sojourn found him partying with friends and hangers-on, and testifying at a murder trial in nearby Burnsville (he had been witness to an altercation between the principals a week before the murder took place), although he managed often to avoid his garrulous mother and the rest of his fractious family. How he got any writing done is a mystery not solved by this narrative.
Wolfe’s death, from tuberculosis meningitis on Sept. 15, 1938, a couple of weeks short of his 38th birthday, occurs about midway through the book, the rest of which is taken up with the posthumous publication of novels and short stories from the voluminous crates of manuscript he left behind. Neither Perkins, with whom he broke after his second novel, “Of Time and the River,” was published, nor his second editor – Edward Aswell – comes off well here. To Aswell, who had signed Wolfe less than a year before his death, fell the gargantuan task of organizing the million-word manuscript Wolfe had delivered just before embarking on a western trip during which he fell ill.
Mauldin thinks that both editors erred in shaping Wolfe’s work (although the portrait of his redoubtable agent Elizabeth Nowell is sympathetic and engaging). Her intended audience is not the reader with only a casual interest in Thomas Wolfe, but the aficionado (of which there are many), or the scholar seeking a precise record of the author’s final months and his posthumous publication history.
“Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin?,” Joanne Marshall Mauldin. 376 pp., softcover, $38. University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 800-621-2736, utpress.org.
