Mr. Perkins gladly consented to prepare an article; he was engaged upon it at his sudden death on 17 June 1947. Although the article was to have been expanded by another three thousand words, with a more detailed discussion of Wolfe as a person, as it stands it has the effect of a self-contained statement. It is published as the last writing of Maxwell Perkins and as an expression of the memorial which he planned to compose to Thomas Wolfe.

I think that there is not in any one place so nearly complete a collection of an author’s writings and records as that of Thomas Wolfe’s now in the Harvard Library. When he died on that sad day in September 1938, when war was impending, or soon after that, I learned that I was his executor and that he had actually left little — as he would have thought, and as it seemed then — besides his manuscripts. It was my obligation to dispose of them to the advantage of his beneficiaries and his memory, and though the times were bad, and Wolfe had not then been recognized as what he now is, I could have sold them commercially, piecemeal, through dealers, for more money than they ever brought. I was determined that this literary estate should remain a unit, available to writers and students, and I tried to sell it as such; but at that time, with war clouds gathering and soon bursting, I could find no adequate buyer.

Then Aline Bernstein, to whom Wolfe had given the manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel, sold it by auction for the relief of her people in misfortune, on the understanding that it would be given to Harvard. Not long after that William B. Wisdom, who had recognized Wolfe as a writer of genius on the publication of the Angel, and whose faith in him had never wavered, offered to purchase all of his manuscripts and records. He had already accumulated a notable collection of Wolfiana. His correspondence showed me that he thought as I did — that the point of supreme importance was that these records and writings should not be scattered to the four winds, that they be kept intact. And so the whole great packing case of material — letters, bills, documents, notebooks and manuscripts — went to him on the stipulation, which I never need have asked for, that he would will it all to one institution. Since Look Homeward, Angel was already in Harvard, since Tom Wolfe had loved the reading room of the Library where, as he so often told me, he devoured his hundreds of books and spent most of his Harvard years, Mr. Wisdom made a gift of all this to Harvard. And there it now is.

Though I had worked as an editor with Thomas Wolfe on two huge manuscripts, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, I was astonished on that Spring evening of 1935 when Tom, about to sail for England, brought to our house on East 49th Street, because Scribner’s was closed, the huge packing case containing all his literary material. Tom and I and the taxi man carried it in and set it down. Then Tom said to the man, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Lucky.’ ‘Lucky!’ said Tom — I think it was perhaps an Americanization of some Italian name — and grasped his hand. It seemed a good omen. We three had done something together. We were together for that moment. We all shook hands. But for days, that huge packing case blocked our hall, until I got it removed to Scribner’s.

The first time I heard of Thomas Wolfe I had a sense of foreboding. I who love the man say this. Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble. It was in 1928 when Madeleine Boyd, a literary agent, came in. She talked of several manuscripts which did not much interest me, but frequently interrupted herself to tell of a wonderful novel about an American boy. I several times said to her, ‘Why don’t you bring it in here, Madeleine?’ and she seemed to evade the question. But finally she said, ‘I will bring it, if you promise to read every word of it.’ I did promise, but she told me other things that made me realize that Wolfe was a turbulent spirit, and that we were in for turbulence. When the manuscript came, I was fascinated by the first scene where Eugene’s father, Oliver W. Gant, with his brother, two little boys, stood by a roadside in Pennsylvania and saw a division of Lee’s Army on the march to Gettysburg.

But then there came some ninety-odd pages about Oliver Gant’s life in Newport News, and Baltimore, and elsewhere.