THOMAS WOLFE'S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER

An important collectors' item, and the closest to an autobiography we shall get in a collection of letters scattered through most of his lifetime, written to the mother who played so vital a part in his life. These letters are Thomas Wolfe, with his genius, his overwhelming ago, his enormous vitality. Hounded by money problems during all of his life, driven by poverty to take teaching jobs, only to throw them over when he got a few dollars ahead, writing, writing, writing, buoyed up by hope and ambition and confidence, helped now by one friend, now another -- but forming few intimate relationships, these letters and cards and telegrams and cables reveal much of the torment that drove him. Too seldom, however, he let himself go in brilliant passages that carry one book to the best of Look Homeward, Angel. A sensitive, little boy side shows now and again. The letters carry up to his sudden death.