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 He was the first American writer to leave two complete, unpublished novels in the hands of his publisher at death.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:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)