Is Genius Enough?

THOMAS WOLFE (196 pp.)—Herbert J. Muller—New Directions ($2).

It has now been nearly ten years since Thomas Wolfe died, and in that decade his reputation with the critics has steadily declined, while his popularity with the public has increased. His admirers see Wolfe as a rock-solid, almost primitive spokesman of the American people, whose novels are a grandiose articulation of their own vague, subterranean but insistent attitudes towards the puzzles of human life, and whose writing absorbed the textures, aromas, frustrations, daydreams and tragedies of America with an amplitude unequaled by any writer...