Thomas Wolfe - Career

Career

Unable to sell any of his plays after three years due to their excessive length, including a time when the Theatre Guild came close to producing his play Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage. He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. 18 years his senior, Bernstein was married to a successful stockbroker with whom she had two children.

In October 1925, Wolfe and Bernstein became lovers and remained so for five years. Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing. He returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of a novel, O Lost, which eventually evolved into Look Homeward, Angel. An autobiographical novel that fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, the narrative chronicled family, friends and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland." His family was fictionalized under the name Gant, with Wolfe calling himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza.

The original manuscript of O Lost was over 100 pages and 66,000 words longer and considerably more experimental in character than the final edited version of Look Homeward, Angel. The editing was done by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Initially, Wolfe expressed gratitude to Perkins for his disciplined editing. It has been said that Wolfe found a father figure in Perkins, who had five daughters and found in Wolfe a sort of foster son relationship. Perkins cut the book to focus more on the character of Eugene, a stand-in for Wolfe himself.

When the novel was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929, Wolfe dedicated it to Bernstein. Soon after the book's publication, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein. The publication of the novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters. Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years due to the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim fellowship. Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany. Some members of Wolfe's family were also upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.

After four more years writing in Brooklyn, the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it down significantly and create a single, bestseller-sized volume, which would be titled Of Time and the River. This novel was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel. In a twist from the publication of his previous novel, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time if they hadn't been included than if they had. The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein. In 1934, Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent.

Wolfe left Scribner's and signed with Harper Bros. By some accounts, Perkins' severe editing of Wolfe's work prompted him to leave the Scribner imprint. Other accounts describe Wolfe's growing resentment that some attributed his success to Perkins' work as editor. In 1936, Bernard DeVoto, reviewing The Story of a Novel for Saturday Review, wrote that Look Homeward, Angel was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners."

Wolfe spent much time in Europe and was especially popular and at ease in Germany, where he made many friends. However, in 1936, he witnessed discriminatory incidents towards Jewish people that upset him and changed his mind about the political developments in the country. Wolfe returned to America and published a short story chronicling the incidents called "I Have a Thing to Tell You" in The New Republic. Following that publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government and he was prohibited from traveling there. Wolfe did return to Asheville in the summer of 1937 for the first time since publication of his first book.