The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

his plans to become a playwright, Wolfe now began to write down, mostly as narrative, but sometimes simply in long lists, everyone and everything he had ever seen, felt, or believed, filling “enormous ledgers, filling book after book in [a] furious attempt to define the physical limits” of his “experience.”33 The enormous crates of manuscript he left behind as a result of this “torrent” of self-expression would provide the material not only for the two massive tomes published in his lifetime, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, but also for the very long, posthumously published third and fourth novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), which introduce a new novelist-protagonist, George Webber.34 Designed to prove to his critics that he could write about someone other than himself, these novels nonetheless essentially take up the story of Wolfe’s life where it left off as the story of Eugene Gant, telling it now as the story of George Webber. One can almost imagine Wolfe, spared the tuberculosis that killed him, living to complete the circle, as it were, of his autobiographical-fictional project, arriving at last at the Borgesian day when he must admit that what his novelist-protagonist has just done is write the sentence just written by Thomas Wolfe.