In May, 1938, having broken with his first editor and mentor Maxwell Perkins (“Foxhall Edwards” in the novel), Thomas Wolfe deposited an unfinished manuscript of perhaps a million words on the desk of his new editor, Edward C. Aswell of Harper and Brothers, and left for a tour of the West. In Vancouver, he contracted pneumonia, in Seattle it worsened, and finally, after he had been moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, it was found that the illness had triggered the release in his lungs of previously latent tuberculosis bacteria, which had gone to the brain; he died on September 15, 1938.

It was thus left to Aswell to assemble, organize, and edit Wolfe’s admittedly unfinished material into publishable works. The major results of Aswell’s efforts were the two massive novels that chronicle the life and artistic development of George Webber, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again. Consequently, the episodic, fragmentary, sometimes even arbitrary structure of these books and the unevenness and occasional excessiveness of the writing must in part be the result of the compositional problems—though these flaws also exist in Wolfe’s two prior works. There is no way of knowing what the final forms of the novels would have been had Wolfe lived to complete them to his own satisfaction.

It has been said that Wolfe wrote only one book during his career, a thinly disguised autobiography. In a sense this is true, but, like Walt Whitman, the American author who seems most like Wolfe in artistic intention and attitude, Wolfe saw his own experience as the focal point for the experience of a nation still in the process of becoming. Thus, as the major character in Wolfe’s novels strives for experience, personal meaning, and a means of artistic expression, he is also trying to seize and formalize the nature and direction of nothing less than American society itself.

You Can’t Go Home Again is the most external and social of Wolfe’s four major novels. The title sets the theme and action line of the novel. George cannot go “home” to any of the old places, experiences, or ideas that have formed him because every time he attempts to do so, he finds a corruption that has destroyed the thing to which he would return or he finds that he has gone beyond that particular experience and has neither the need nor the desire to repeat it. Metaphorically, “home” is the naïve, idealized vision of America and of George’s potential place in it that he had held as a young man but now learns no longer exists and perhaps never did. When George returns to his hometown of Libya Hill to attend his aunt’s funeral, he finds the old rural values gone and a new corrupt speculative fever running rampant. Then he sees the collapse of this greedy dream in the beginnings of the Depression. He cannot go back to his physical home because it no longer exists, and he is repelled by what has replaced it. Libya Hill, however, is only a microcosm, a foreshadowing of what he is to encounter. As America enters into the Depression, George comes into painful contact with the results of the American economic and social system as he intimately observes both its victims and its victimizers—and he seeks to disassociate himself from both.

It is Europe and especially Germany, however, that brings George to his final understanding. The notion that artistic success and fame will bring him satisfaction is destroyed by his meeting with the famous novelist Lloyd McHarg (a fictionalized Sinclair Lewis),...