‘Read this and tell me what you think,’ he said.

All these years later it is still difficult to express what I felt and thought. I was immediately drawn into Old Gant’s far-wandering hunger to carve the angel. Wolfe’s Altamont, rimmed by the mountains of Old Catawba, was a more tangible geography than my own backyard, and the Gants, so caught up in tumultuous life, were as real as the people I saw every day. The book raised the curtain on the world; it articulated some compulsion to write I had no words for. Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page. The book was insistent, it wouldn’t leave me alone. Wolfe whispered to me in the night and his soaring incantory rhetoric of trains highballing it through October nights and his search for the stone, the leaf, the unfound door, sang in the blood like a hallucinatory drug.

Everything about Wolfe was larger than life. His talent, his ego, his sensitivity to criticism. His physical self. His books, which were really one novel about a man experiencing the world. He never married, fathered a child, had a permanent home. He died young, and he may never have located that unfound door, but he came closer than anyone else.

When I was growing up magazines used to run essays on American novelists — the old masters were still around, Faulkner and Hemingway and Steinbeck — and the critic used to assess the up and comers and conjecture who was going to write the great American novel. I was a little bemused by this. Even I knew that Thomas Wolfe had already written it.”

— WILLIAM GAY,

author of The Long Home

Books by Thomas Wolfe

Of Time and the River
The Web and the Rock
You Can’t Go Home Again
From Death to Morning
The Story of a Novel


SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons Copyright renewed © 1957 by Edward C. Aswell, as Administrator, C.T.A. of the estate of Thomas Wolfe and/or Fred W. Wolfe

The essay on Thomas Wolfe by Maxwell E. Perkins is reprinted from the Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 3 (Autumn 1947), by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1947 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The introduction by Robert Morgan is reprinted in a slightly different form from the Thomas Wolfe Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Fall 2000, by permission of Robert Morgan. Copyright © 2000 by Robert Morgan.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Library of Congress Control Number: 971390

ISBN: 1-4165-4243-4

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To A. B.

“Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis’d in you, (in whom alone
I understand, and grow and see,)
The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
Which tile this house, will come againe.”

Contents


 

O Lost, and Found

Thomas Wolfe

To the Reader

Part One

Chapter1

Chapter2

Chapter3

Chapter4

Chapter5

Chapter6

Chapter7

Chapter8

Chapter9

Chapter10

Chapter11

Chapter12

Chapter13

Part Two

Chapter14

Chapter15

Chapter16

Chapter17

Chapter18

Chapter19

Chapter20

Chapter21

Chapter22

Chapter23

Chapter24

Chapter25

Chapter26

Chapter27

Part Three

Chapter28

Chapter29

Chapter30

Chapter31

Chapter32

Chapter33

Chapter34

Chapter35

Chapter36

Chapter37

Chapter38

Chapter39

Chapter40

A Scribner Reading Group Guide

O Lost, and Found

One of the great events of my teen years was the appearance of the Henderson County bookmobile in the parking lot of Green River Baptist Church every first Monday of the month in the late 1950s. The vehicle was an old utility truck outfitted with bookshelves. I had never seen so many books before. From those shelves I picked Farmer Boy, Jack London’s White Fang, James Oliver Curwood’s The Valley of Silent Men, as well as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.