THE FACE OF A NATION

Here are seventy-odd passages of varying length selected from the novels and short stories of the ""enfant terrible"" of our literary era. We cannot feel justified in appraising this as it should be done. Thomas Wolfe has universally met with conflicting critical verdicts. This staff feels, in conjunction with some of the leading critics that Wolfe's emotional energy, intensity, self-bound fecundity, marred his prose -- that he was perhaps ""the Tarzan of rhetoric... enamored with ""the altitudinous, swooning prose of the 17th century"" (Alfred Kazin) and that his ""poetic instinct unbuckled on a kind of week-end debauch"" (Robert Penn Warren). Anyhow, for your record, here are the prose-poetry passages which will find a place among your Wolfe collectors, but, in other cases, only dubiously.