Afterward
Wolfe saw less than half of his work published in his lifetime, due to the amount of the material he left at his death. He was the first American writer to leave two complete, unpublished novels in the hands of his publisher at death. Two further Wolfe novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, were edited posthumously by Edward Aswell of Harper and Row. The novels were "two of the longest one-volume novels (some 700 pages apiece) ever written." In these novels, Wolfe switched his autobiographical character from Eugene Gant to George Webber.
O Lost, the original "author's cut" of Look Homeward, Angel, was reconstructed by F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli and published in 2000 on the centennial of Wolfe's birth. Bruccoli said that while Perkins was a talented editor, Look Homeward, Angel is inferior to the complete work of O Lost and that the publication of the complete novel "marks nothing less than the restoration of a masterpiece to the literary canon."
Read more about this topic: Thomas Wolfe
Famous quotes containing the word afterward:
“When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)