Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe, His Novels, and the Critics

Thomas Wolfe writes in his 1936 manifesto, The Story of a Novel, that "there is no such thing as an artistic vacuum". Carol Johnston's Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe and the Critics is based on that thesis; its premise is that literature is as much the product of the social and critical community in which it evolves as it is the product of any individual's experience. The narrative of this text explores the dialog between Wolfe and his critics - a dynamic dialog in which the stakes, a young author's literary reputation and his ability to support himself as an artist, were high. Wolfe's energies were pitted against the fashionable critical theorists of the twenties and thirties, and as a result, the critical debate during those years was particularly bitter and at points vengeful. Wolfe dealt with his critics accordingly, often using his fiction as a means of responding to them. Johnston depicts it all: the depressions that Wolfe endured after reading the reviews of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River; his response to his critics both in his correspondence and notebooks and in his fiction; his relationship to his publishers and his critics and their relationship to him. Her study reveals in unique ways the nature not only of Wolfe's professional career but of the literary marketplace in America during and after the 1920s.