The Autobiography of an American Novelist

by Thomas Wolfe, Leslie Field (Editor)

Wolfe describes how he became a writer, wrote his first novel, and handled the problems his sudden fame caused

168 pages, Paperback

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

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, this is not the autobiography of Thomas Wolfe or anybody else. The book is two essays repurposed from two lectures. The first, titled “The Story of a Novel,” was given at the University of Colorado in 1935, and describes the gestation of Wolfe’s mammoth Of Time and the River. The second essay, “Writing and Living,” was delivered at Purdue University in 1938 during Wolfe’s last public appearance before his death from tuberculosis later that year.

The essays—especially the first—are classic Wolfe: poetic, exuberant, luxuriant, and ridiculously loquacious. Wolfe detractors might call this style logorrhea. Wolfe himself admits that in the three years of preparing Of Time and the River, he wrote two million words and then worked the manuscript down, in “skeletonized form” to a million words—twelve times the length of an average novel and twice as long as War and Peace (71). Fortunately, Wolfe had as his editor at Scribner’s the patient and tenacious Max Perkins (1884-1947), who kept cutting as Wolfe kept writing (and whose name Wolfe never mentions in either essay).

Wolfe’s second essay is more approachable than the first. One imagines that by 1938, Wolfe felt more comfortable in his own skin, that he had learned to reign in his grandiose tendencies and could even comfortably indulge in some humor.

Though Wolfe is clear that in these lectures he had no intention of providing practical advice for young writers, I think there really is sound practical advice here. It just doesn’t come with bullet points. For instance, Wolfe quotes Horace: “You can change your skies but not your soul” and then follows with this explication:

“I saw suddenly that what many of us had been doing for years had been to change our skies constantly in the hope that by such change some magic transformation would be wrought in our own spirit; that what we had really been doing all this time when we had been going to Paris, Spain, and Italy to work was really to seek an escape, to fly from the stern necessity of conflict and of labor, somehow to get away from the indolence, the lack of substance, power, courage, or talent in our own spirits. I learned instantly and forever that this mythical, this magical, this wonder-working, miraculous, and mysterious place to work was everywhere, was all around us, was whatever we happened to be so long as the power, the will, the overwhelming and inexorable necessity to work was in ourselves.” (28)

Well, that’s one way to put it; but I’ll take Horace.

[Mark Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Wolfe’s untimely death in 1938, at the age of 37, stilled the voice of one of America’s leading writers of fiction. Although Wolfe only published two novels during his lifetime, he left behind enough material that two more novels were published posthumously. Wolfe’s 1936 book The Story of a Novel detailed the writing and editing process of Wolfe’s mammoth second novel, Of Time and the River, published in 1935.

The 1983 book The Autobiography of an American Novelist collects The Story of a Novel and “Writing and Living,” a May 1938 speech that Wolfe delivered at Purdue University that proved to be his final public speech before his death in September of 1938. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, as Wolfe doesn’t recount his entire life story. If you want to read Thomas Wolfe’s autobiography, go read his novels.

The Story of a Novel tells us how Wolfe found it difficult to follow up the success of his first novel, 1929’s Look Homeward, Angel. A popular and critical success, Wolfe’s first novel thrust him into the position of “the next great American novelist,” the same position F. Scott Fitzgerald had occupied at the beginning of the 1920’s, and Ernest Hemingway had occupied in the middle of the decade.

Wolfe was taken aback at the negative reaction in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to Look Homeward, Angel. Note for authors: people generally do not like to see themselves portrayed in novels. It makes me wonder if there’s been a novel that was instantly embraced by the people of the real town portrayed in the novel?

As Wolfe found out, sometimes success can be as hard to deal with as failure. And because Look Homeward, Angel was a success, now there were lofty expectations upon him. The longer it took for Wolfe to publish a second novel, the louder the murmurs were that he was “just a one book author,” that he had said all he had to say with his first novel.

To counter the critics, Wolfe kept writing. And writing and writing. He eventually delivered a manuscript to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners in a giant crate. Wolfe estimated the manuscript was about 2 million words long. (p.58) Or about 4 times as long as War and Peace. Wolfe had written 100,000 words just about a train journey across Virginia. (p.76) That’s about twice the length of The Great Gatsby.

Maxwell Perkins must have been a pretty amazing person to deal with his three star authors: Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Any one of those geniuses would be enough for most people to handle. Perkins helped Wolfe transform his massive manuscript into Of Time and the River. Perkins goes unnamed in The Story of a Novel, but of course modern readers know he’s the editor to whom Wolfe is referring.

I think Wolfe honestly depicted the editing process of his manuscript in The Story of a Novel. It was a true collaboration between Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins. However, after The Story of a Novel was released, it became the subject of a scathing take down by critic Bernard DeVoto. In a piece titled “Genius is Not Enough,” published in the Saturday Review of Literature, DeVoto attacked Wolfe, charging that the writer was overly dependent on Perkins’ help.

DeVoto described Wolfe’s “incompleteness,” charging that “one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins.” DeVoto wrote that it was not enough to be a genius when it came to writing novels, “it must be supported by an ability to impart shape to material, simple competence in the use of tools.” (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, p.295-6)

Wolfe was deeply wounded by DeVoto’s blistering personal attack, and it was a key factor in Wolfe’s eventual break with Perkins. I think DeVoto’s criticism was worthless and cruel. However much Maxwell Perkins helped Wolfe in editing the book, the words on the page were still Wolfe’s, and Wolfe’s alone. Perkins helped in the arrangements of those words, but the words were Wolfe’s. DeVoto portrayed Wolfe as a kind of idiot savant, smart enough to write the words, but not smart enough to put them in the right order.

I think Wolfe was honest in writing The Story of a Novel, but DeVoto then used that honesty against him, as though Wolfe’s struggle with the raw material of the novel was something to be ashamed of. In a way, DeVoto’s attack on Wolfe was an attack on Wolfe’s masculinity. DeVoto was advocating for a type of literature based on rugged individualism, where an author shouldn’t need the editor’s help to put things together. The editor should just correct spelling errors. But Wolfe was admitting that he needed help, and there’s no shame in that.

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe touches on what it meant to be a boy growing up in Asheville, North Carolina who wanted to be an author. “I may have thought that it would be a fine thing to be a writer because a writer was a man like Lord Byron or Lord Tennyson or Longfellow or Percy Bysshe Shelley. A writer was a man who was far away like these people I have mentioned...it seemed to me that a writer was a man from a kind of remote and unknowable people that I could never approach.” (p.5) I was struck by that quote, and thinking about how Wolfe didn’t have a role model for the kind of writer he would become. He had to make his own way and forge his own path.

In “Writing and Living,” Wolfe wrote of Look Homeward, Angel: “It is what is called an autobiographical novel—a definition with which I have never agreed, simply because it seems to me every novel, every piece of creative writing that anyone can do, is autobiographical.” (p.120)

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe wrote: “It is literally impossible for a man who has the stuff of creation in him to make a literal transcription of his own experience. Everything in a work of art is changed and transfigured by the personality of the artist.” (p.20)

I like these two ideas of Wolfe’s: that creative writing may draw its spark or inspiration from real life, but that it is inevitably changed and altered by the artist through the creative process. And whatever you choose to write about is autobiographical because it inevitably reveals something about your personality.

Wolfe name-checked F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Writing and Living,” and although Wolfe didn’t say anything about Fitzgerald’s writing, I took it as a sign of respect that Fitzgerald was one of the few authors mentioned by name in “Writing and Living.” Although they were very different stylists, I think Wolfe and Fitzgerald respected each other’s talent.

There is an inevitable sadness in “Writing and Living,” as Wolfe writes of “the cycle of my thirty-seven years,” and the reader knows that he will not make it to thirty-eight. (p.145) Wolfe was putting a period on this cycle of his creative life. “The circle ends full swing: this period of every man—a phrase in the great lexicon of what all living in the cycle now is ended, and I say farewell...I know now that you can’t go home again.” (p.152)

“Writing and Living” ends with the word “hope,” as Wolfe described charting a new course into a new phase of his creative life, but sadly he didn’t have time to fully explore this new land. The Autobiography of an American Novelist, imperfect as its title may be, is still a fascinating look at a man who devoted his energies to the creative life.

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some people may find the title of this book slightly misleading, as it is actually comprised of the complete texts of two lectures given by Wolfe on the subject of writing, along with a short introduction by Leslie Field. The first of these, "The Story Of A Novel" was actually published in book form in 1936, and focuses on the writing of Wolfe's second novel, "Of Time And The River". It's fascinating to read about how the original text was around a million words long (!) and how it was edited down to a digestible length. The second essay, "Writing And Living" was not published during Wolfe's lifetime and focuses on how he gradually became less self-obsessed and more interested in the social problems going on all around him (although he was NOT one of those writers who converted to communism in the '30s).
This is a handy volume which I was able to buy more cheaply than "The Story Of A Novel" on its own, which is what I was interested in reading. However, the problem with it is that quite a lot of the material here made its way into Wolfe's last two novels, often word-for-word, so if, like me, you've already read those, you may find this to be of limited value.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Wolfe is a captivating writer, poetic and vivid. The story of how he came to write his second novel is quite compelling here.