Thomas Wolfe's Civil War ed. by David Madden (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS David Madden, ed. Thomas Wolfe's Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004, 224 pages. Paperback. $19.95 When Maxwell Perkins accepted the manuscript for what would eventually become known as Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's first novel, one of the major cuts he required to reduce the novel by 90,000 words was the book's opening scene, which recounted W. O. Gant's boyhood experience of watching Confederate soldiers march into Pennsylvania on their way to the Battle of Gettysburg. While many allusions to the Civil War pepper the bildungsroman, none offer a sustained depiction of the war's effect on the Gant family, the autobiographical counterpart of Wolfe's own. Even though cutting this material made a more tightly structured novel, Perkins' intention, it also concealed a major theme of Wolfe's, which explores the effects of the Civil War on his own life, on the Southern character, and on America's post-bellum destiny. This important but rarely published episode makes up the first of nine selections included in Thomas Wolfe's Civil War by David Madden, well-known Civil War novelist, scholar, and professor at Louisiana State University, who edited the volume wanting to offer a fresh examination of Wolfe "as a major contributor to Civil War literature". While the texts collected support Madden's thesis that Wolfe's "Civil War pieces might be counted among his greatest achievements," the wide range of genres included also illustrate the extent of Wolfe's range and versatility as a fiction writer. Besides episodes from the novels Of Time and the River, The Web of Earth, and The Good Child's River, Madden also includes sections from the author's last completed play, Mannerhouse, as well as four short stories: "The Four Lost Men,"""His Father's Earth,"""Chickamauga," and The Plumed Knight." While all of Wolfe's texts receive full biographical and critical discussion in the book's fifty-page introduction, Madden offers especial insight into the experimental complexity of "The Four Lost Men," which "no distinct genre exists to accommodate" (25), and Act Four of Mannerhouse, an early work that presents more than any other Wolfe's "lifelong preoccupation with the Civil War" (19). While most critics have traditionally maligned these pieces on aesthetic grounds, 76 Madden offers fresh biographical readings within an historical context that may lead a critical reassessment of both works. What is most exciting about Thomas Wolfe's Civil War is that it offers a short yet diverse collection of the author's fiction at an affordable price for students. Those teachers who have neglected Wolfe because the length of his novels are unfriendly to classroom time constraints or because the 600-page'Collected Short Stories costs too much to justify course inclusion now have a reader-friendly text that can be adopted for a wide range of American literature and history courses. The lay-reader will find the same rhetorical gusto, youthful enthusiasm, and modernist vision that have kept Wolfe's work in print since their initial publication over seventy years ago. Madden's book offers a fresh perspective from which to read Wolfe, a contribution to American literary scholarship that, along with Rob Ensign's "Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe's Greener Modernism, may spearhead the author's canonical revival. —Shawn Holliday 77 ...