THE LOST BOY

A year before his own premature death in 1938, Wolfe wrote this slender and evocative novella about the long-ago and sudden death by typhoid of his older brother Grover, an event that took place in 1904, when Grover was 12 and Wolfe only four. Typically and often beautifully Wolfean, the tale is a moving lament not only for lost youth, lost innocence, and lost hope, but for lost time itself (``And he feels nothing but absence, absence, and the desolation of America, the loneliness and sadness of the high, hot skies...''). In somewhat abbreviated form, the novella was published in 1937 in Redbook magazine, in 1941 in The Hills Beyond, and in 1987 in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. Here, it appears with cuts restored.