“I wrote and wrote and wrote,” Wolfe tells Mildred. “Every time I’d get a hundred thousand pages piled up, I’d take them to my friend Max Perkins of Scribner. And every time he’d say, ‘That’s good, that’s the real stuff. But it’s only the knee joint.’ Or, ‘It’s only an arm.’” In Wolfe’s mind, his book was a statue and he couldn’t arrange all the pieces properly. That’s what he needed Perkins for, he tells Mildred, to put it all together.
