Tomas Vulf

Thomas Wolfe was an American writer, a representative of the “Lost Generation.”

“Look,” he said at last, “here is a book; it was written by a giant who was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. He has long since turned to dust, but once he wrote four enormous novels. He was like a hurricane. He raised mountains and drew whirlwinds into himself. On September 15, 1938, he died in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, of an ancient dreadful disease—pneumonia; after that there remained a suitcase crammed with manuscripts, all written in pencil.”

And yet, it would seem, it is hard to imagine two less similar, less kindred writers. The finest stylist and psychologist Ray Bradbury managed, in light, transparent, surprisingly “un-American” novellas, to create an entire world of the Future. Attractive, convincing, and so self-sufficient that, in the author’s own view, this world required its own, entirely different chronicler.

Thomas Wolfe. Far less popular in our country than his fellow science-fiction writer. I think I will not be mistaken in assuming that many of us first learned of this writer’s existence precisely from Bradbury’s “The Long Years and the Earth.” Do you remember how the story’s hero, with the help of a time machine, brings into the future that one writer whose epic talent is capable of conveying the grandeur of Time and Space, of reflecting the latest history of mankind, which has gone into space and is making discovery after discovery.

He loved and described everything in that sort of way, majestic and formidable. He was simply born too early. He needed truly grand material, and he found nothing like that on Earth.

As for Thomas Wolfe himself, he would hardly have thought of complaining about a lack of material. His material, enough for four gigantic books, each of which can rival War and Peace in size, was life itself—his own life, organically woven into the context of the life of his country, America. Only that life ended far too early for such a giant. Then, sixty-five years ago