THOMAS WOLFE possessed a singularly delicate sensory perception, a remarkably retentive memory, a passionate concern with the nature of experience, a deep patriotic strain, a commitment to self-expression, and a powerful rhetorical style. These elements combined in his work to produce a vast, sprawling epic of one man’s experience in America. At his death in 1938, just before his thirty-eighth birthday, Wolfe had published two long novels, a collection of short stories and short novels, and an essay on literary method. He left behind an enormous mass of manuscript out of which his editor shaped two more novels and another collection of short pieces.
