Lush and fascinating: an essential reference for Wolfe fans and scholars.
Impressive array of primary documents, photographs, commentary and miscellany relating to the novelist’s short life and controversial career.
Mitchell, who works at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C., is no disinterested bystander. He characterizes as “myth” the notion that the author of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again was an undisciplined genius whose literary sequoias were shaped into artful (though still sizeable) bonsai by Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins. The biographer defends, too, the autobiographical character of Wolfe’s fiction, arguing that “the roots of all creation in writing are fastened in autobiography.” The text begins with the writer’s birth, in 1900, proceeds chronologically to his death, in 1938, then considers his uncertain reputation today. Mitchell laments Wolfe’s absence from the contemporary academic canon, speculating that his novels’ enormous length may be somewhat to blame. The wide array of illustrations includes photographs of the author at all stages of his life (an amusing one shows him at age eight with Byronic curls), as well as images of his family, friends, literary acquaintances. A sad one captures his brother beside the bed where Wolfe lay dying of tuberculosis. Photocopies abound of all sorts of documents: undergraduate transcript, Master of Arts diploma from Harvard, contracts with Scribner’s, a sweet telegram from F. Scott Fitzgerald congratulating Wolfe on Angel, death certificate. Also reproduced are newspaper and magazine articles and reviews of Wolfe’s work, including a generous selection of reactions from the newspapers in Asheville, his hometown. Mitchell reprints long, informative passages from Wolfe’s correspondence, notebooks, stories, novels and poems. His bitter exchanges with Perkins just before Wolfe left Scribner’s for Harper & Bros. make painful reading. A brief, brisk narrative stitches it all together.
Lush and fascinating: an essential reference for Wolfe fans and scholars.Pub Date: May 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933648-10-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
