THE WEB AND THE ROCK

by Thomas Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 22, 1939

The phenomenal success of his last book, Of Time and the River, makes one feel that this is certain to roll up a big advance,and presumably to secure headline reviews. With Thomas Wolfe's death, American literature lost a potential power. Whether or not he would ever have outgrown his utter inability to select and discard, his obsession with himself and his actions and motives and emotional turmoils, and built upon the queer streak of genius to greater things, we can never know. This book, which comprises half of the manuscript delivered to Harper before his death, is again a turgid outpouring of his own emotional life, put into fictional form, but recognizable in its general pattern to anyone who knows the skeleton facts of his life and temperament. It adds little to his posthumous fame, for it has the same weaknesses, even more sharply emphasized, and the same sense of power that made his earlier work memorable. The story traces a boyhood in a southern town, the years of college with its opportunity for escape from the ""web"" of family ties, the coming to New York, seeking ever seeking a focus and a meaning of life, then a year in Europe -- and on the return trip, the meeting with the woman who became the central factor in his life. Those who have read The Journey Down by Aline Bernstein (Knopf -- reviewed on page 554, of the 1937 bulletins) will be interested in paralleling the man's side of the story. This ""game"" of identification of personalities and incidents will stimulate New York interest in the book -- but outside the literary and theatrical circle involved, the whole portrayal of the great emotional experience of a life will be subjected to the battery of tenets of good taste. Clearly not a book for the tender-minded and the shockeasilies.

Pub Date: June 22, 1939

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1939

Categories: FICTION