The Story of A Novel

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. First Edition, First Printing [Scribner's "A" present on verso]. Hardcover. Good/Good. [8], 93, [1] pages. DJ has some wear, tears, and soiling. Some endpaper discoloration. The text of this book, with certain modifications, first appeared in a series of three articles in the Saturday Review of Literature in December, 1935. Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 - September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective. After Wolfe's death, contemporary author William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered North Carolina's most famous writer. Southerner and Harvard historian David Herbert Donald's biography of Wolfe, Look Homeward, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1988. Derived from a brief Kirkus review: Strange the impression left after reading this little book on how he came to write Of Time and the River is virtually that of "briefing" his own book. It is more than an expanded essay on manner and method and theory -- it epitomizes the conception and the birth pangs of the book itself -- and it reflects the content of the writer's "struggle in his youth." the Story of a Novel has been accepted as a most important contribution to the writings of Thomas Wolfe, a book not only for readers of Wolfe, but for all concerned with processes of literary creation.