Beyond Love and Loyalty: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Nowell, Together with 'no More Rivers, a Story By Thomas Wolfe

by Thomas Wolfe, Elizabeth Nowell, Richard S. Kennedy (Editor)

Letters--mostly of the nuts-and-bolts, practical variety--between Thomas Wolfe and his literary agent, Elizabeth Nowell. Nowell served as Wolfe's editor for many of his short stories, paring them down to make them acceptable to magazines. Oddly enough, his attitude toward her was grateful rather than adversarial, and their deep mutual respect is clearly evident in these letters.

Originally published in 1983.

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164 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

People best know American writer Thomas Clayton Wolfe for his autobiographical novels, including Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and the posthumously published You Can't Go Home Again (1940).

Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels and many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He mixed highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. Wolfe wrote and published books that vividly reflect on American culture and the mores, filtered through his sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. People widely knew him during his own lifetime.

Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan with Gap Creek; Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Wolfe influenced Ray Bradbury, who included Wolfe as a character in his books.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Kirk]

Didn’t [people] ever ask themselves why they should get up in the morning at all, why they should dress, and gulp down coffee, and then rush out into the streets with a look of grim determination in their eye, to push and be pushed, dodge and scuttle across, be hurled through tunnels and come swarming, clawing their way out of them—for what? for what?—So that they could get from one ridiculous little cell where they slept, to another ridiculous little cell where they worked, and go about doing ridiculous things all day long—writing ridiculous letters, making or receiving ridiculous telephone calls, “getting in touch” (which was itself ridiculous, how? why? should you try to “get in touch” with anyone)—with other ridiculous people, looking up ridiculous things in a filing cabinet, or filing them away. Good Lord, couldn’t they see that all of it was a spectacle to make the men on Mars—if men on Mars exist-ed—split their sides with laughter? Couldn’t they see that everything began with and returned to the only thing for which they should care at all—the frail uncertain beating of a—heart!
For him, at any rate, that had become the only thing for which he cared—to keep his own heart beating, to avoid in every way he could the brutal shocks of life and business, of speed, confusion, noise, and violence, of love, of grief, of happiness and heartbreak! Great God! Would people never learn? Would they never understand that the frail and naked heart could not be used as a football, kicked about by all the brutal and indifferent feet of life? Oh, if he could only tell them how slight a thing it took to plunge the anguish of a cureless hurt into the heart’s deep core—how slight a thing—a tread upon the stairs—the intonation of a voice, the opening of a door—could fill the heart with joy and anguish—if he could only tell them how slight a thing it took to make hearts break!

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a way, Richard Kennedy's thank you note to Elizabeth Nowell