Thomas Wolfe 101

Book: "Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life" by Ted Mitchell, Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site, 52 North Market Street, Asheville, N.C. 28801

114 pages. Paperback $8.95

Writer Ted Mitchell drew on his 10 years as "Historic Site Interpreter" for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial to compose a compendium of Wolfe's life, beginning with the author's rearings in Asheville and ending with his death at age 38.

Mitchell's is not the first biography on Wolfe, but at roughly 100 pages and priced at under $10, it is perhaps the most welcome one. Painstakingly researched and footnoted, "Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life," provides almost as much detail about Wolfe's life as heftier scholarly tomes that span 300 or more pages. Mitchell puts the facts down so squarely, one foot in front of the other, that after an hour's sitting, you feel that you've gained an intimate acquaintance with Wolfe.

Mitchell skillfully describes Wolfe's anxieties about his writing and his critics, such as Bernard DeVoto, who accused Wolfe of being "astonishingly immature" as a novelist and charged that Wolfe could not work without the help of Charles Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins. "Such organizing faculty," DeVoto wrote in "Genius Is Not Enough," published in The Saturday Review of Literature, "and such critical intelligence as have been applied to the book [Wolfe's, "The Story of a Novel"] have come not from inside the artist, not from the artist's feeling for form and esthetic integrity, but from the office of Charles Scribner's Sons."

We learn how Wolfe eventually broke with Scribner's and began calling publishers asking whether they would be interested in publishing his future novels. "My name is Wolfe," he would blurt out, often intoxicated. "Would you like to publish me?"

One of the questions asked most often at the Wolfe Memorial, according to Mitchell, is, What did he mean by the book title, "You Can't Go Home Again?" On page 80 of "A Writer's Life," Mitchell gives us the answer in Wolfe's own words. In a letter that Wolfe wrote, he says that his new book " . . . might almost be called "You Can't Go Home Again" . . . which means back home to one's family, back home to one's childhood, back home to the father one has lost, back home to romantic love, to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame . . . back home to one's youthful ideas of the 'artist,' and the all-sufficiency of 'art and beauty and love' . . . "

Mitchell's book provides great insight into Thomas Wolfe's life. Even if you've never read Wolfe's work, you will enjoy this quick-paced biography. And if you're one of the 23,000 visiting the Wolfe Memorial this year, you'll appreciate "Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life," as an indispensable guide that breathes new life into the author and the home where he grew up.--Ralph Grizzle