Customer Reviews

Thomas Wolfe: An Illustrated Biography

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For Thomas Wolfe fans, this new illustrated biography is absolutely delicious. Mitchell is to be congratulated on his excellent work and it will certainly be appreciated by all Wolfe lovers. Mitchell is contributing to a more than worthy cause - keeping this exquisite author in the public eye. Three cheers!!!

My daughter was invited to apply for a scholarship to Chapel Hill for the "Thomas Wolfe Scholarship" I must confess that I was ignorant of Mr. Wolfe's work and thought that the scholarship was in the name of Tom Wolfe. I wanted to find out more about Thomas Wolfe and was delighted to find that this book was a exhaustive as the work of the author. However, this book, unlike most of Thomas' work was completely focused, extremely well documented, and supported by photographs, newspaper clippings, manuscript scans, and reviews (both positive and negative) of Mr. Wolfe's life and work. Each of the works published during Mr. Wolfe's all too short life are extensively documented both in Mr. Wolfe's creative process and society's response to his works. Wolfe was so Joycean in his approach that it is easy to see how his work pre-figured the writings of the Beat generation. For those who are merely curious about Wolfe's work yet not ready to tackle his incredibly long, and some would say, disorganized, novels, this biography is a highly engaging look that provides so much insight into the man and his work that you may find yourself drawn into wanting reading some of the author's works. If you are already a fan and do not have this book, your bookshelf has a gaping hole waiting to be filled by this amazing book. The book, which is almost as long as some of Wolfe's publications provides generous quotes of his works and extensive history of his life and creative process. While reading this, I found myself feeling that I truly knew and understood this man. This is also an awesome book for those interested in the craft of writing, American thought and culture, and the post slavery and pre-civil rights era in the South.

This book was especially touching in that it showed me the close bond between Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins. I shed a few tears in reading a long letter he wrote to Maxwell Perkins expressing his disillusionment and hurt feelings over the sequence of certain events in his publishing life and the reply that Mr. Perkins gave to Mr. Wolfe was as a loving patient father to a son. I am so glad that Thomas's final letter was to Mr. Perkins and that it expressed the love and close bond that he obviously felt toward him.

There are other and better biographies of Wolfe but the real treasure of the book is the cornucopia of pictorial material and the reproductions of manuscript pages.