Books: Mother and Son

THOMAS WOLFE'S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER—Scribner ($3).

The father of the late novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River) was a stonecutter of great rhetorical influence on his son. Echoes of his surging speech resound through Wolfe's novels. But the novelist's mother, a sinewy woman still living at the age of 83 in Asheville, N.C., was probably an even greater influence. She is a positive personality. "You told me," her son once wrote to Julia Elizabeth Wolfe, "that three great Americans had their birthday in February, and when...