Thomas Wolfe

J.R. Moehringer does not mention in his interesting article on the declining reputation of Thomas Wolfe ("Fading Embers of Thomas Wolfe," Jan. 15) that a critical cloud hung over Wolfe even during his own brief lifetime: He lacked a certain writerly control over his prodigious material and so had to rely heavily on his gifted editor, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's. Wolfe's work was his own, to be sure, but his sense of novelistic form did not match his wonderful ability to evoke the emotions and images of the scenes from his own life.

Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life Evan Hughes Holt Paperbacks: 352 pp., $16 On Sunday in Brooklyn, as people are standing in line to hear Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Egan and Jhumpa Lahiri, others will be parking their strollers so Adam Mansbach can sign copies of his alt-parenting book "Go the F-- to Sleep. " The Brooklyn Book Festival has become New York City's preeminent public daylong literary event - even though it takes place across the river from Manhattan, the epicenter of publishing.

Home was everything to Thomas Wolfe, his lifelong destination and torment. You can't go home again, he warned, a lament that's become not just an American proverb, but Wolfe's terribly true self-prophecy. More than 60 years after his death, Thomas Wolfe has never been quite so homeless. At Wolfe's boyhood home here, workmen come and go, repairing the damage done last summer by an arsonist. But curators of the house, a popular museum and National Historic Landmark, say it will never be the same.

David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and American South whose expertise on Abraham Lincoln brought him a wide general audience and reverence from his peers, has died. He was 88. Donald died of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston on Sunday while awaiting heart surgery, said his wife, Aida. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, Donald won Pulitzers for biographies of abolitionist Charles Sumner and novelist Thomas Wolfe.

We came to Asheville because my friends thought I was being so understanding about their obsession with mountain crafts, I deserved a bookish interlude. If in the process they unknowingly volunteered for a modest on-site seminar in early 20th-Century American literature, it was their own fault. The mini-course did not stop at the city line.

It was one of the college legends, along with Prof. Kittredge throwing chalk at dozing students and the president's sister, Amy Lowell, sitting on the curb in front of an outlying police station smoking a cigar and waiting for someone to come fetch her.

One dull gray morning in Manhattan in the 1930s, ThomasWolfe left his tiny 1st Avenue apartment to head downtown, sharing the elevator with a woman and her unruly German shepherd. The dog kept straining at him until her grip broke, then leaped up and planted his paws flat on the chest of the tall and disheveled 6-foot, 6-inch writer with piercing eyes, a sudden celebrity then being assailed all over New York for his notorious first novel, 1929's "Look Homeward, Angel." "Wolfe!

Thomas Wolfe. Once it was a name that evoked reverent tones among fiction readers, critics and fellow novelists. Even Faulkner allowed that his contemporary from Asheville, N.C., just might be the best writer of his generation. But no more. In academia, Wolfe's titanic novels have all but vanished from the "canon"--literature regarded as worthy of intensive study. Few novelists today would admit to literary kinship with Thomas Wolfe, who died in 1938.

Michael Ventura's thoughtful piece on the ever-changing nature of Los Angeles (Opinion, Aug. 13) portrays "a city that won't stay fixed and can't be defined." This recalls a description penned by novelist Thomas Wolfe in the 1930s not of a city but of an entire nation: "Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America, that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement." Any way you slice it, Los Angeles and America continue to move and change. That's how we came to be what we are today.

Matthew J. Bruccoli, 76, a University of South Carolina English professor who wrote and edited about two dozen books on author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died Wednesday of a brain tumor at his home in Columbia, S.C. Bruccoli taught at the university for almost 40 years and was the Emily Brown Jefferies distinguished professor emeritus. He was best known for his authoritative works on Fitzgerald, including "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (1981) and "Scott and Ernest: The Fitzgerald-Hemingway Friendship" (1978)

Actor-director Frank Galati tells the quintessential John Logan anecdote. "His home in Evanston was gorgeous, an immense, yellow brick villa with a capacious garden," Galati says. "You walked up these broad stone stairs onto a terrace and into rooms with Minimalist decor and exquisite art objects. "But, as you gazed down a long, long corridor, there, at the end, stood a giant, life-size statue of the Alien." Logan to a T: elegant, tasteful, history conscious, slightly mischievous and increasingly a player in Hollywood.

"Who knows?" replied Lou Piniella, knowing there is no real answer. The Seattle Mariners' manager was sitting in his clubhouse office at Edison Field on a midweek afternoon, thinking about what once was, who Ken Griffey Jr. once was. He said he is pulling for his former center fielder to regain his incomparable form but wonders if the injuries that have impaired Griffey's talent--and dimmed his infectious persona--in each of the last two years might...

There is a lot going on between the two greatly separated covers of "O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life" (University of South Carolina Press), the first draft of Thomas Wolfe's first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel." In this 736-page book, there are 60,000 more of Wolfe's words, lovingly restored by literary scholars Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli, who are given the unusual frontispiece credit "text established by." There are also pictures of the author, his family and his Asheville, N.C.

One dull gray morning in Manhattan in the 1930s, ThomasWolfe left his tiny 1st Avenue apartment to head downtown, sharing the elevator with a woman and her unruly German shepherd. The dog kept straining at him until her grip broke, then leaped up and planted his paws flat on the chest of the tall and disheveled 6-foot, 6-inch writer with piercing eyes, a sudden celebrity then being assailed all over New York for his notorious first novel, 1929's "Look Homeward, Angel." "Wolfe!

Michael Ventura's thoughtful piece on the ever-changing nature of Los Angeles (Opinion, Aug. 13) portrays "a city that won't stay fixed and can't be defined." This recalls a description penned by novelist Thomas Wolfe in the 1930s not of a city but of an entire nation: "Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America, that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement." Any way you slice it, Los Angeles and America continue to move and change. That's how we came to be what we are today.

** 1/2 Meat Loaf,"Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell" MCA Records. Mr. Loaf may look less meaty these days, but there's still a lot of cheese in his diet. "Hell II" attempts to re-create the shameless theatrical juvenilia that was 1977's "Bat Out of Hell," one of rock's grandest guilty pleasures. And there are crafty glimmers here of what made that vinyl behemoth such gloriously adolescent fun.

Matthew J. Bruccoli, 76, a University of South Carolina English professor who wrote and edited about two dozen books on author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died Wednesday of a brain tumor at his home in Columbia, S.C. Bruccoli taught at the university for almost 40 years and was the Emily Brown Jefferies distinguished professor emeritus. He was best known for his authoritative works on Fitzgerald, including "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (1981) and "Scott and Ernest: The Fitzgerald-Hemingway Friendship" (1978)

J.R. Moehringer does not mention in his interesting article on the declining reputation of Thomas Wolfe ("Fading Embers of Thomas Wolfe," Jan. 15) that a critical cloud hung over Wolfe even during his own brief lifetime: He lacked a certain writerly control over his prodigious material and so had to rely heavily on his gifted editor, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's. Wolfe's work was his own, to be sure, but his sense of novelistic form did not match his wonderful ability to evoke the emotions and images of the scenes from his own life.

Home was everything to Thomas Wolfe, his lifelong destination and torment. You can't go home again, he warned, a lament that's become not just an American proverb, but Wolfe's terribly true self-prophecy. More than 60 years after his death, Thomas Wolfe has never been quite so homeless. At Wolfe's boyhood home here, workmen come and go, repairing the damage done last summer by an arsonist. But curators of the house, a popular museum and National Historic Landmark, say it will never be the same.