Books: Bitter Mystery

THE WEB AND THE ROCK — Thomas Wolfe—Harper ($3).

The passions and furies of the late Thomas Wolfe made him seem like some frenzied Wagnerian hero condemned to live in a nursery. In his autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, he recorded only the emotions of his childhood and adolescence, the first intellectual awakenings of his young manhood. What passions, readers asked themselves, what intensities of brooding, pain and rhetoric would Thomas Wolfe show himself evincing in his first serious love affair? The possibilities were slightly awesome to contemplate.

The...

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