Thomas Wolfe: Realist and Symbolist

Abstract

When two years ago last September Thomas Wolfe died at the age of thirty-eight writers and readers of his generation felt a grief that most of our elders have been unable to understand. The reason for our sense of loss was not simply a very real enthusiasm for what Wolfe had written, or even a conviction that he had within him many unwritten books such as no one else could write. It was, most of all, the curiously emblematic position Wolfe had come to hold and in which his death served to confirm him. He died of being Thomas Wolfe-the news reports spoke of pneumonia-of having lived, perceived, reflected, and composed with an intensity which would have killed most men ten times over. He had carried one mode of approaching the universe to the absolute.