Concerned about lingering resentment from the community over the literary work and his tenuous relationship with his family members, Wolfe returned to his hometown with caution, but also with the need to both rejuvenate and compile material for his next novel.

It is this visit that sparks Wolfe's trademark conclusion, "You can't go home again." During 1937 and 1938, Thomas Wolfe experienced extreme highs and lows as he labored furiously to produce his next work. Joanne Marshall Mauldin provides an in-depth look at those final two years in the life of the brilliant, yet troubled writer in Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin?

By adding new information and insight, Maudlin challenges much of the existing biographical material on the writer and offers a fresh view on the final years of his life. Through the utilization of primary and secondary sources including letters, interviews, recordings, and newspaper clippings, Mauldin offers a candid account of the life of Thomas Wolfe from the time of his visit to North Carolina in 1937 until his untimely death in 1938. Mauldin chronicles details of Wolfe's shocking change in publishers and his complex relationships with his editors, family, friends, and his mistress. This examination goes beyond Wolfe's life and extends into the period after his death, revealing details about the reaction of family and friends to the passing of this literary legend, as well as the cavalier publishing practices of his posthumous editors.

Edited by Ted Mitchell, Windows of the Heart collects seventy-five letters exchanged between Wolfe and Margaret Roberts, the grade-school teacher he called "the mother of my spirit," and follows the ebb and flow of their complex relationship. By turns encouraging, revealing, and painful, their letters document one of the most important forces in the novelist's life.

When Wolfe entered a writing contest at age eleven, Roberts easily identified the young boy's literary potential. From that moment forward she became his most ardent supporter. His teacher for four years, she awakened in him a love for fine literature and a belief in his abilities. Wolfe later described the years under her tutelage as "the happiest and most valuable years of my life."

Published for the first time in their entirety and supplemented with forty-two photographs, the letters between teacher and student portray Roberts's significance to Wolfe and provide important clues to his process of fictionalization. Wolfe confides to Roberts--as he can to no one else--about fame, his writing, his life, his affair with Aline Bernstein, and his interactions with editor Maxwell Perkins.

Their correspondence builds to the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. After seventeen years of an intense and loving relationship, Roberts feels betrayed by the novel's satiric portrayal of her husband and his family. Their communication stops for seven years, but in a testament to her love for Wolfe, Roberts eventually reinitiates a correspondence that lasts until his death.

To Loot My Life Clean : The Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence "My friendship with Tom," were the posthumous words written by Perkins to Wolfe's family, "was one of the greatest things in my life." Here is the mostly unpublished 251 letter, 10-year correspondence between Wolfe and his Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins which attest to the unvarnished TRUTH about their often-contentious relationship which survived Wolfe's 1937 break with his publishers. Wolfe's rawly emotional and chaotic letters convey his homesickness and decry "the sterility crowd," the "sniffers, whiffers and puny, poisonous apes", giving never-before-seen details and insights into this fascinating creative partnership.

Discover the Bliss of Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward, Angel A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man's burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy.

The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader.

"Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished."-- Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons

"Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life. . . . It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience."-- Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian

"Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page."-- William Gay, author of The Long Home

"As so many other American boys had before and have since, I discovered a version of myself in Look Homeward, Angel, and I became intoxicated with the elevated, poetic prose." -- Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek

In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer.

The work of an exceptionally expressive writer of fertile imagination and startling emotional intensity, Of Time and the River illuminates universal truths about art and life, city and country, past and present. It is a novel that is majestic and enduring. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, "It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life."

This edition, published in celebration of Wolfe's centennial anniversary, contains a new introduction by Pat Conroy.

Leaving New York City, he is dismayed at the social decay he finds on his travels to England, Germany, and his small hometown in the Carolinas. Nonetheless, he is optimistic about the future of the United States.

The Plot: George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town he is shaken by the force of the outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and friends feel naked and exposed by the truths they have seen in his book, and their fury drives him from his home. He begins a search for his own identity that takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. At last Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow, and hope.

"If there stills lingers and doubt as to Wolfe's right to a place among the immortals of American letters, this work should dispel it."
--Cleveland News

"Wolfe wrote as one inspired. No one of his generation had his command of language, his passion, his energy."
--The New Yorker

"You Can't Go Home Again will stand apart from everything else that he wrote because this is the book of a man who had come to terms with himself, who has something profoundly important to say."
--New York Times Book Review

"For the lover of 'Look Homeward, Angel' the tired phrase 'essential reading' is an understatement. There is magnificent new material here (this version is 66,000 words longer than LHA). For me, the most notable appears at the beginning--a long section detailing the early life of W.O. Gant, lovingly rendered, heartbreakingly real, writing so vivid that it must be admitted that Perkins made a terrible mistake in cutting it; it is as good as anything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote. Too, the famous kaleidoscopic scene in which we see dozens of Altamont residents waking one morning in 1908 as newspapers are delivered is here much longer, much more inclusive, with far more wonderful character sketches--writing so pure that it seems to capture for all time what a certain time and place was...."