SOURCE: "The Influence of Modernist Structure in the Short Fiction of Thomas Wolfe," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 149-61.

[In the following essay, Bentz characterizes Wolfe as an experimentalist in short fiction whose use of non-traditional plot structure and thematic epiphany align his short stories with those of his modern contemporaries.]

The most famous attack on the fiction of Thomas Wolfe is Bernard DeVoto's 1936 essay "Genius is Not Enough." In it DeVoto identifies three points of weakness in Wolfe's fiction that critics have returned to repeatedly over the years. The first criticism is Wolfe's lack of artistic control and looseness of form. DeVoto blasts Look Homeward, Angel for "long whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction, badly if not altogether unacceptably written, raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, grunts, and Tarzanlike screams" (132). The other two familiar criticisms in DeVoto's essay are that Wolfe's editors ("the assembly line at Scribner's") made too many of the artistic decisions that should have been made by the novelist, and that Wolfe misused and overused autobiographical material. Not all critics have been as hostile as DeVoto, and certainly Wolfe has had his defenders, but the issues DeVoto raised have set the agenda for much of the debate about Wolfe for the past 50 years.

Most of the critical focus over the years has centered on Wolfe's sprawling novels, but with the publication in 1987 of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, this other body of his work has begun to receive attention. Wolfe wrote 58 short stories, but until the complete collection was published, 35 of these stories had never been published in book form, and one had never been published anywhere (Skipp xvii). The overemphasis on Wolfe's seemingly loosely structured novels has obscured his experimentation in the short story. While the structure of his novels owes a greater debt to nineteenth-century fiction than to the modernist fiction of the 1920s and '30s, the structure of many of Wolfe's short stories was heavily influenced by modernism.

Modernist short-story writers rejected traditional attitudes toward form in the short story. Richard Kostelanetz, an historian of the American short story, describes some key features of modernist short-story structure:

In the short story of the 1920's . . . the action is greatly pruned until the story appears rather plotless. Yet every detail serves an artistic function; nothing seems unconsidered or accidental. The short stories in the Twenties exhibit greater emotional complexity and ambiguity, as well as a more discriminating sense of emphasis and an increased brevity of representation (in short, a modified, more selective, realism). . . . Instead of concentrating on plot development, the authors resort to rhetorical strategies and parallelism and repetition; the narrator often speaks in the first person and may be a major participant in the action rather than just an observer of it; and the story's end comes as an anticlimax after the earlier epiphany. (220)

Modernists rejected traditional form in the short story because they believed that form presents a misleading picture of the nature of reality. As Clare Hanson explains, "Modernist short fiction writers distrusted the well-wrought tale for a variety of reasons. Most importantly they argued that the pleasing shape and coherence of the traditional short story represented a falsification of the discrete and heterogeneous nature of experience" (55). She adds that the "rounded finality of the tale" was rejected, "for story in this sense seemed to convey the misleading notion of something finished, absolute, and wholly understood" (55).

Scholars have generally understood and accepted the modernist approach in the fiction of Wolfe's contemporaries, but Wolfe's experiments in modernism have often faced hostility. When Wolfe rejects a traditional plot story for a more experimental approach, his work is called "formless"; when his contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson engage in similar experiments, it is called "modernism." A brief look at the critical response to Anderson will illuminate some of the points I wish to make about Wolfe.

Arthur Voss, in his history of the short story in America, credits Anderson with the "liberation" of the short story (183). Anderson, as he puts it, "revolted against the stereotyped and conventional fiction of his time" (183). Anderson's novel Winesburg, Ohio, like many of Wolfe's stories, does not have a plot in the traditional sense of the term. The "plot story," as A. L. Bader defines it, is any story

(1) which derives its structure from plot based on a conflict and issuing in action; (2) whose action is sequential, progressive, that is, offers something for the reader to watch unfold and develop, usually by means of a series of complications, thus evoking suspense; and (3) whose action finally resolves the conflict, thus giving the story "point." (108)

Waldo Frank describes the form of Anderson's stories, in contrast, with a term that has often been applied to aspects of Wolfe's writing. He says, "The form is lyrical" (84). He compares the form, for instance, to the "lyrical art of the Old Testament psalmists and prophets in whom the literary medium was so allied to music that their texts have always been sung in synagogues" (Frank 85). He describes the design of individual stories as "a theme-statement of a character with his mood, followed by a recounting of actions that are merely variations on the theme" (85). The few stories in which Anderson attempts a straight narrative, Frank argues, are the least successful. Frank is not the only scholar to describe the structure of Winesburg, Ohio in terms of its lyrical nature. Irving Howe says the stories' impact depends "less on dramatic action than on a climactic lyrical insight" (103).

The point here is not to say that Anderson and Wolfe were trying to accomplish the same goals. They are very different writers. But their stories share an emphasis on a "climactic lyrical insight" rather than on traditional plot. Because some critics have insisted on foisting a traditional attitude toward structure on Wolfe's work, what passes for a "lyrical form" in Anderson might be called "long whirling discharges of words" in Wolfe.

As A. L. Bader points out, the critics' reaction to modernist short-story structure has often been one of puzzlement or outright hostility:

Readers and critics accustomed to an older type of story are baffled by a newer type. They sense the underlying and unifying design of the one, but they find nothing equivalent to it in the other. Hence they maintain that the modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous—frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance—everything, in fact, except a story. (107)

It is interesting to note how similar this reaction is to the reaction Wolfe's stories have received from some critics. When Wolfe's first collection of short stories, From Death to Morning, was published in 1935, for example, the reviewers had trouble categorizing the stories. Ferner Nuhn wrote that few of the pieces could be called short stories "in any strict sense; lyrical essays, themes with variations, moods of reminiscence, they might perhaps be called" (7). Harold Mumford Jones wrote,

I think it is Chesterton who remarks there is no such thing as a Dickens novel, but only a series of segments cut off from that vast and flowing thing which is Dickens. From Death to Morning is a collection of fourteen segments cut off from that vast and flowing thing which is Thomas Wolfe. (13)

Jones said the collection could best be described as "a group of sketches, for none of them rises into a full-bodied short story" (13).

Later critics were even more hostile toward Wolfe's approach toward form. Martin Maloney, for instance, wrote in 1955,

In Wolfe's Faustian world, "stories," (meaning the common conventions of modern fiction) did not and probably could not exist: 'life' alone mattered. Wolfe did not write 'stories,' but instead produced a single, long, complex narrative, imposing no formal structure on it. . . . (168)

This stereotype about the structure of Wolfe's stories remains to this day. In a review of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, in 1987, Monroe K. Spears praised many of the stories but also claimed that "Wolfe was afflicted by a kind of literary bulimia, devouring life insatiably and expelling it in his writing, which he was unable to restrain or control" (34).

How did Wolfe approach the structure of the short story? Wolfe had trouble fitting his work into established categories no matter what genre he experimented with. He gave up drama because his plays were too long and wordy, but when he switched to the novel, which better suited his talents, he still had difficulty keeping his work short enough to meet his publisher's expectations. For instance, Wolfe's first manuscript, "O Lost," which later was trimmed to become Look Homeward, Angel, was 1,113 typed pages long, or about 330,000 words, which was about three times the length of most novels in the 1920s (Donald 176). Wolfe also liked to save material discarded from one project to use it in a later one. As Leslie Field explains,

Wolfe was not the sort of writer who creates a novel and then a second one with freshly composed material. . . . Thus some of his writing for You Can't Go Home Again could belong to the Look Homeward, Angel period of composition, or sections of The Web and the Rock could very well be discards from Of Time and the River. (Field, TW and His Editors 3-4)

Wolfe took an equally unconventional approach toward short-story writing. Most of the stories were adapted from the massive manuscripts that eventually became his novels. Some stories, because of their innovative approach toward point of view, narrative technique, or subject matter, could not be fit into the novels and stood alone as short stories. Often the stories were published to keep Wolfe's name before the public or to earn him badly needed money. Not surprisingly, Wolfe's unconventional approach toward short-story writing brought mixed results. As J. R. Morris describes Wolfe's achievement in a review of the 1987 collection, "Whether they are truly short stories or simply fragments of that one endless story Thomas Wolfe spent his life writing, the 58 pieces of short fiction in The Complete Short Stories include some of Wolfe's best writing, and, alas, some of his worst" (127).

Despite Wolfe's unusual writing methods, his stories share important characteristics with those of his contemporaries in the modernist era. Short-story historian Eileen Baldeshwiler identifies two types of stories that were prominent in the modernist period. The larger group of narratives, which she calls "epical," are "marked by external action developed 'syllogistically' through characters fabricated mainly to forward plot, culminating in a decisive ending that sometimes affords a universal insight, and expressed in the serviceably inconspicuous language of prose realism" (443). This kind of short story, which I earlier identified as the "plot story," is the kind critics say Wolfe had difficulty structuring. The second kind of story, which Baldeshwiler calls "lyrical," and which I call "modernist," "concentrates on internal changes, moods, and feelings, utilizing a variety of structural patterns depending on the shape of the emotion itself, relies for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem" (443).

Besides its open ending and heightened language, the modernist short story also emphasizes not a linear plot, but rather a single significant moment of insight. In Clare Hanson's words, "The emphasis of modernist short fiction was on a single moment of intense or significant experience" (55). Nadine Gordimer writes, "Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point" (180). Various scholars have commented on James Joyce's influence on Wolfe. Joyce's term for the "light of the flash" was "epiphany." It is appropriate to examine Wolfe's stories using that term. In Stephen Hero Joyce defined the term:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (Joyce 211)

Wolfe was aware that stories that abandon the traditional linear plot structure in favor of the more open-ended modernist structure were often misunderstood by readers and critics. In a letter to Hamilton Basso he wrote,

We [Americans] have hunted always for the short cut, the practicable way, and I think the effect of this—it does not seem to me at all far fetched to think—has been to hunt for the short cut, the easy and practicable way, the neat definition, everywhere: hence the neat glib finish of the O. Henry type of short story, the "punch at the end," the "gag," and many other kinds of gimcrackery. (Letters 632-33)

Wolfe insisted on breaking free of such constraints in many stories. Not all of his stories fit the modernist mode; many of them are more traditionally structured, and some of them defy categories altogether. But measuring some of them against modernist rather than traditional criteria may reveal Wolfe's real artistic achievement.

A good example of a Wolfe story written in the modernist mode is "No Cure for It," published in The Hills Beyond. An amusing story of about 2,000 words, it records an incident in which a worried mother, Eliza Gant, calls Doctor McGuire to her home to examine her seven-year-old son Eugene, because the ways in which his body is maturing "don't seem natural" ("No Cure" 534). His arms and legs seem too long and out of proportion to the rest of his body, she thinks. Doctor McGuire, who is more amused than concerned by Eugene's condition, asks the boy to wrap his leg around his neck, which the boy does with no problem, as Eliza puckers her face in worry and disapproval and says, "Get out of here! I don't like to look at anything like that!" Doctor McGuire declares that Eugene is all right, but calls him "a little monkey" (534). The doctor says, "He'll get all of his parts together some day and grow out of it!" At this point Eugene's father, who has a penchant for hyperbolic rhetoric, comes home and blames the boy's condition on Eliza: "Woman, this is your work! Unnatural female that you are, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has ruined us all, eaten us out of house and home, and sent me to the poorhouse to perish in a pauper's grave!" (535). But later he tones down this rhetoric, reassuring Eugene by telling his son it was the same with him when he grew up, and that someday Eugene will be a big man.

The story at first glance is a comic anecdote about growing up, made funnier by Eliza's exaggerated worry, the father's outrageous hyperbole, and the doctor's amusement at the whole situation. The story gains further significance, however, by the references Wolfe includes about the flux of time and time's impingement upon the boy's life. The story begins with Eliza calling the boy, and the next sentence says, "He heard her call again, and listened plainly to her now, and knew she would break in upon his life, his spell of time, and wondered what it was she wanted of him" (533). He makes no move and does not answer her. He merely listens as she invites the doctor inside and has a conversation with him. When they reach the room where he is stretched out on the couch, he continues to lie there, "listening to the time-strange tocking of the clock" and regarding his brown bare legs and sun-browned toes "with a look of dreamy satisfaction" (533). It is as if time has transported him beyond the here and now, giving him a fascinating sense of detachment from himself. When Eliza scolds him for not answering her, he scrambles up sheepishly, "unable to deny that he had heard her, yet knowing, somehow, that he had not willingly disobeyed her" (533). He did not have the words to identify or describe the detachment this new awareness of time had given him, but it had made him unable to respond to her before.

Wolfe returns to the theme of time at the end of the story. Eugene's father has just comforted him by telling the boy he will grow up to be a big man someday. The last paragraph is a scene of suspended animation, with the mother, father, and doctor looking at the boy, as he considers them. The story ends, "He thought his father was the grandest, finest person in the world, and as the three of them looked at him he could hear, in the hush of brooding noon, the time-strange tocking of his father's clock" (536). This story does not follow a traditional plot. It is modernist in its emphasis on, in Hanson's words, the "single moment of intense or significant experience" (180). There is nothing inherent in the fairly ordinary incident that makes it a "significant moment" for the protagonist. It is only the boy's ability, even if he cannot verbalize it, to connect that moment with the past, future, and eternal time, that makes the experience so important.

What does the boy learn about time? It would be easy to answer too reductively, but a few discoveries are clear. At the beginning of the story he discovers he can lose himself in a "spell of time," a period of reflectiveness in which time seems suspended, until ordinary reality, in the form of Eliza, breaks him out of it. He gets a taste of being outside of time, but he cannot stay out of its flow for long. At the end of the story he discovers that even though at present his body is all out of proportion, time brings change. The sound of his father's clock represents the force of time that will make him a man. Therefore, as he gazes at his parents and the doctor at the end of the story, he grins proudly and is "worried about nothing" (536).

Wolfe uses time in an even more elaborate way in one of his best and most famous stories, "The Lost Boy." The story was published by Redbook in 1937 and appeared with some changes in The Hills Beyond. In 1992 Wolfe scholar James Clark edited a much longer version of the story, which was published as a novella by the University of North Carolina Press. The version I refer to here is the Redbook version, which is the one included in The Complete Stories. This story, like "No Cure for It," has no plot in the traditional sense. It is, however, carefully structured. The story is about the narrator's attempt to "find" his brother who died more than 30 years before at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The narrator searches for him by recreating the stories he has heard about him and by going to St. Louis to see the house where his brother Robert had died when the narrator was only four years old.

The story is in four parts. The first part is the narrative of an incident that happened to Robert in his hometown before the family went to the fair. The second section is from Robert's mother's point of view and includes her reminiscences of him. The third section contains memories of Robert from his sister's point of view. The last section is from the narrator's point of view, in which he describes his visit to the house where Robert died.

The story shares a number of structural and thematic characteristics with "No Cure for It." "The Lost Boy," like the other story, contains an epiphanic moment in which the character comes to a realization about time and his own relationship to it. In fact, "The Lost Boy" contains two such moments, one for Robert, the "lost" brother whom the narrator is trying to search through time to "find" or recreate, and one for the narrator himself, as his search reaches its climax. In both stories the encounters with time are presented in the mystical or "lyrical" language that was such a hallmark of Wolfe's writing.

Wolfe's symbol for "time immutable" in "The Lost Boy," as well as in other stories, such as "An Angel on the Porch," "The Bell Remembered," and the novel Look Homeward, Angel, is the town square. Robert begins the story in the square, where he senses "the union of Forever and Now":

Light came and went and came again: the great plume of the fountain pulsed, and the winds of April sheeted it across the Square in rainbow gossamer of spray. The street cars ground into the Square from every portion of the town's small compass and halted briefly like wound toys in their old quarter-hourly formula of assembled Eight. The courthouse bell boomed out is solemn warning of immediate Three, and everything was just the same as it had always been. (Wolfe, "Lost Boy" 359)

Robert surveys every building and landmark on the square, listing them one by one, and concludes, "here is the Square that never changes; here is Robert almost twelve—and here is Time" (359). As Wallace Stegner describes this section of the story, "There is a quality of trance: the returning plume of the fountain, the returning winds of April, the streetcars going and coming, the chanting of the strong repetitious rhetoric and the sonority of recurrent sounds put a magic on this Square even at its most real" (256).

After the description of the Square at the beginning of the story, Robert has his confrontation with "old stingy Crockers," the candy shop owner. Robert does not have enough money to pay for the candy, so he uses postage stamps to pay for part of it, as he had done before in Crocker's store. Robert accidentally overpays Crocker by three one-cent stamps. Realizing his mistake, Robert asks Crocker to give him back the three stamps. Crocker ponders for a moment, and then answers, "I don't like this kind of business. I'm not a post office. The next time you come in here and want anything, you'll have to have the money for it" (362). He does not return the stamps. When Robert again demands that Crocker return the stamps, Crocker and his wife imply that Robert probably stole the stamps anyway. Crocker shouts at the boy, ordering him to leave the store and never come back.

Angry and humiliated, Robert leaves the store and steps onto the Square, which just moments before this humiliating incident had represented stability and time immutable to him. People walk by, but he doesn't notice them. He stands "blindly, in the watches of the sun, but something had gone out of the day" (363). His anger gives way to the "soul-sickening guilt that all the children, all the good men of the earth, have felt since time began. And even anger had been drowned out, in the swelling tide of guilt." His sense of stability had been shattered. In his own way he realizes that unlike the Square, he is subject to the sometimes violent flow of present time: "There is the Square,' thought Robert as before. This is Now. There is my father's shop. And all of it is as it has always been—save I'" (364).

Robert immediately goes to his father's stonecutting shop nearby and tells him what has happened. His father takes Robert back to the store and humiliates Crocker into returning the stamps. Though Robert and his father are triumphant, Robert realizes the experience has changed him. He has become aware of two kinds of time: present time, in whose flow he finds himself caught, and time immutable, in whose stability he had always depended. His realization is presented this way:

And light came and went and came again into the Square—but now not quite the same as it had done before. He saw that pattern of familiar shapes, and knew that they were just the same as they had always been. But something had gone out of the day, and something had come in again: out of the vision of those quiet eyes some brightness had been lost; into their vision some deeper color come. He could not say, he did not know through what transforming shadows life had passed within that quarter-hour. He only knew that something had been gained forever—something lost. (366)

The narrator, who is Robert's younger brother, has a very different but equally significant encounter with time in the last section of the story. In this section the narrator, now a man in his thirties, goes back to St. Louis, where his brother Robert had died 30 years before when part of the family lived there during the 1904 World's Fair. The narrator finds King's Highway, which was near the house where the family had lived. Memories of this place begin to flood his mind, and he searches some more until he finds the house. He is ready for some kind of encounter with the lost brother, and with Time. He says, "And again, again, I turned into the street, finding the place where the two corners meet, the huddled block, the turret, and the steps, and paused a moment, as if the street was Time" (375). He has prepared the reader for this encounter too, because before this point the story has presented not only Robert's encounter with Crockers, but also reminiscences of Robert from his mother's voice and memories of Robert from his sister's voice. Before the reader arrives in St. Louis with the narrator, the reader knows the same family legends about Robert that the narrator remembers. When the narrator reaches the house where the family had lived, he, as well as the reader, expects to "find" Robert.

Someone is living in the house, but the narrator knocks on the door and explains to the current resident that he had lived there during the World's Fair. They discuss all the changes that have been made to the house, and finally she invites him in. As soon as he goes in he is almost able to cut through time and bring back the brother who was lost in it. But the past keeps fading away from him, and he cannot quite keep it in his grasp:

All of it was just the same except the strained light of absence in the afternoon, and the child who sat there, waiting on the stairs, and something fading like a dream, something coming like a light, something going, passing fading like the shadows of a wood. And then it would be gone again, fading like cloud shadows in the hills . . . like the dark eyes and the quiet face, the dark lost boy, my brother, who himself like shadows, or like absence in the house, would come, would go, and would return again. (378)

The woman takes the narrator through the house, and he tells what the place used to be like. Finally they go into the room where Robert had died, and he tells her of his brother's death. After they discuss him for a while, she says, "I guess you don't remember him, do you? I shouldn't think you would." Though he answers, "No, not much," her question triggers the encounter with the past that he had been waiting for:

The years dropped off like fallen leaves: the face came back again—the soft dark oval, the dark eyes, the soft brown berry on the neck, the raven hair, all bending down, approaching—the whole ghost-wise, intent and instant, like faces from a haunted wood. (379)

What follows is a flashback scene in which the older brother is trying to get the young narrator to say "Robert," but he can only manage to say "Wobbut." It is the climactic scene—the epiphany—of the story, and when it is over, so is the narrator's search for the lost boy: "I knew that I would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again . . . " (380). The narrator had been able to "find" the brother for a fleeting moment, but now he knows, as the last line of the story says, that the boy "was gone forever and would not return" (380). Robert's encounter in the story is with present time, and the narrator's is with the past, but both of them come to the understanding in the story that they are caught in time's flow and can do nothing to stop it.

Wolfe's achievement in "The Lost Boy" would have been impossible if he had used a traditional plot structure. The purpose of each section of the story is to recreate or "find" the lost boy in a new way. Each section looks at him from a different perspective until, in the final section, when the narrator has his mystical encounter with the boy in the house where Robert died, the reader has been so saturated with details about the boy that the reader is just as ready as the narrator is for the epiphanic encounter. Robert's life is not told in chronological order. Instead, he is recreated the way dead loved ones most often are—by the scattered anecdotes and memories of family legend. In the middle section the narrator allows Robert's mother and sister to relate their memories of the boy in their own voices. Like the narrator, the mother and sister are "searching" for Robert in their memories of him. Their stories are not concise little anecdotes, but instead are halting, full of ellipses, full of digressions. Their stories of Robert become entangled with stories of their own lives. We see clearly that they are not showing us the Robert, but only a Robert who is a product not only of their memory but partially of their imagination. Like the narrator, we must sift through the various versions of Robert to "find" the lost boy. Robert's sister, for instance, intertwines the story of her own life with her memories of Robert's life. Throughout her section of the story the sister refers to a family photograph that prompts her memories.

I was thinking of it just the other day, and I wonder what Robert would say now if he could see that picture. For when you look at it, it all comes back—the boarding house, St. Louis and the Fair. . . . And all of it is just the same as it has always been, as if it happened yesterday. . . . And all of us have grown up and gone away. And nothing has turned out the way we thought it would. . . . And all my hopes and dreams and big ambitions have come to nothing. (374; original ellipses)

In a modernist way, "The Lost Boy" searches through time and memory in order to find the moment of significance. It meanders around the way memory does. Wallace Stegner's final comment on "The Lost Boy" is also true of "No Cure for It":

Not a line of this story, not a trick in it, could have been learned from any generalization about the shaping of fiction. The shape this story takes it takes by a process of transplantation, associated images and ideas being moved from one category of thought to another. (260)

"The Lost Boy" and "No Cure for It" are just two of Wolfe's stories influenced by modernist structure, but there are numerous others. Some of the best examples include "The Train and the City," "The Four Lost Men," and "A Prologue to America." Other stories have modernist characteristics, even though they are not predominantly modernist. The end of "An Angel on the Porch," for instance, deals with time in an epiphanic and mystical way that is similar to "No Cure for It" and "The Lost Boy."

"Circus at Dawn," "April, Late April," "The Promise of America," "The Newspaper," and "No More Rivers" also contain certain characteristics of modernist structure. Wolfe's work does not fit into generic categories very neatly. But analyzing the stories according to their modernist characteristics shows that contrary to what many critics have written, the unusual structure of many of his works was due not to a lack of concern for form or an inability to control his art; instead, Wolfe's works show that he was an experimentalist very much in tune with the bold new approach to fiction that characterizes the writers of his time.

Works Cited

Bader, A. L. "The Structure of the Modern Short Story." May 107-15.

Baldeshwiler, Eileen. "The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History." Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1969): 443-53. Rpt. in May 202-13.

Clark, James W., Jr., ed. The Lost Boy: A Novella. By Thomas Wolfe. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

DeVoto, Bernard. "Genius is Not Enough." Field, TW: Three Decades, 85-104.

Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. New York: Fawcett, 1987.

Field, Leslie. Thomas Wolfe and His Editors. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987.

——, ed. Thomas Wolfe: Three Decades of Criticism. New York: New York UP, 1968.

Frank, Waldo. "Winesburg, Ohio After Twenty Years." White 84-88.

Gordimer, Nadine. "South Africa." Kenyon Review 30 (1968): 457-61. Rpt. as "The Flash of Fireflies" in May 178-81.

Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Howe, Irving. "The Book of the Grotesque." White 101-13.

Jones, Howard Mumford. "Thomas Wolfe's Short Stories." Rev. of From Death to Morning, by Thomas Wolfe. Saturday Review of Literature. 30 Nov. 1935: 13. Rpt. in Thomas Wolfe: The Critical Reception. Ed. Paschal Reeves. New York: David Lewis, 1974. 80-82.

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1944.

Kostelanetz, Richard. "The Short Story in Search of Status." Twentieth Century 174 (Autumn 1965): 65-69. Rpt. in May 214-25.

Maloney, Martin. "A Study of Semantic States: Thomas Wolfe and the Faustian Sickness." Field, TW: Three Decades, 153-76.

May, Charles E., ed. Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976.

Nuhn, Ferner. "Thomas Wolfe, Six-Foot-Six." Rev. of From Death to Morning, by Thomas Wolfe. New York Herald Tribune Books. 17 Nov. 1935: 7. Rpt. in Thomas Wolfe: The Critical Reception. Ed. Paschal Reeves. New York: David Lewis, 1974. 79-80.

Skipp, Francis E., ed. Preface. The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. New York: Scribner's, 1987. xvii-xxvii.

Spears, Monroe K. "Big Bad Wolfe?" Rev. of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Francis E. Skipp. New York Review of Books 24 Sept. 1987: 34-37.

Stegner, Wallace. "Analysis of 'The Lost Boy.'" Field, TW: Three Decades, 255-60.

Voss, Arthur. The American Short Story. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.

White, Ray Lewis. Studies in Winesburg, Ohio. Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1971.

Wolfe, Thomas. The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. Ed. Francis E. Skipp. New York: Scribner's, 1987.

——. "The Lost Boy." Complete Stories 359-80.

——. "No Cure for It." Complete Stories 533-36.

——. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. Ed. Elizabeth Nowell. New York: Scribner's, 1956.

——. The Story of a Novel. The Autobiography of an American Novelist. Ed. Leslie Field. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. 3-89.