Short Stories by Wolfe, Thomas

New York. 1947. September 1947. Penguin Books. 1st Penguin Paperback Edition. Good in Worn Wrappers. . 150 pages. paperback. 644. . keywords: Penguin Paperback America Literature . FROM THE PUBLISHER - A certain picture of the author is apt to emerge from reading Thomas Wolfe's Novels: that of a titanic rhetorician, a word poet who can be chanted, a master, like Whitman, of the barbaric yawp, a a neo-Elizabethan sprung unpolluted from the North Carolina Hills, romantic as Byron, with the turgid faults of the rhetorician. One is apt to think of Wolfe as the gifted enfant terrible of American letters, and to neglect his more solid virtues. A reading of his short stories serves to correct this impression and confirm Wolfe's essential craftsmanship. Actually he is a master of the American short story. He is a gifted humorist - native, bawdy, and socially-conscious; a master of dialects and the spoken word; realistic and incisive in his portrayal of emotion. In his two volumes of stories he proved that he could control his medium, that he could compress and select. ONLY THE DEAD KNOW BROOKLYN will probably last as long as any other story in our language. This selection, taken from the volume FROM DEATH TO MORNING, concentrates on the two phases of his life that held most importance for Wolfe. Section I deals with Carolina and adolescence, the great history and the purescent present of the South, and expresses Wolfe's insatiable appetite for life. Section II deals with the City, with Wolfe's self-exile and self-immolation in Brooklyn, which followed his disenchantment; it expresses his final, and equally insatiate, appetite for death. Section III is THE STORY OF A NOVEL, one of the best accounts in literature of how a novel is created - what emotions, experiences, thoughts went into it; how it was written, how it came to be published. inventory #31674