Ring Lardner Was Baseball’s Bard and an Accidental Literary Man

 

                                             Ring Lardner, the quintessential sports writer at work.

Note: Spring Training is in full swing already and the baseball starved heart beats faster. My beloved Cubs, coming off of a disappointing season and the loss of superstar players are tearing up the Cactus League—almost too good to be true. Meanwhile our woeful South Side rivals have yet to win a game.

 

The fun of following baseball has always been wrapped up in those who told us about the games we could not be in the stands for and the radio and TV voices calling play by play and adding color. Looking back old time sports writers for the highly competitive newspapers created much of the mythos and culture of America’s pastime. None were more essential than Ring Larder. 

 

The most surprising thing about Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, who was born on this date in 1885 in Niles, Michigan, is that he came from a family of considerable wealth and social standing. If you read the stuff he churned out later in life as Ring Lardner, you would assume he was one of those scruffy up-from-the-bottom whiskey drinking newspaper men who with a minimum of education muscled their way out of industrial serfdom or barefoot rural poverty to become an ink stained wretch. 

 

He was the youngest of nine children of a distinguished family who held high hopes for him. His name was chosen at the suggestion of his uncle, Rear Admiral James L. Lardner in honor of an Annapolis classmate, Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold. The boy, naturally, hated both the moniker and all of the expectations of achievement and glory that went with it. He settled on going by Ring, which he admitted didn’t make any sense. He struggled indifferently through high school, more interested in sports and carousing with friends than academics. His parents, having given up on the idea of him getting a top flight education at a service academy, an Ivy League college, or the University of Michigan, shipped him off to study engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, which they considered little better than a trade school. 

 

Young Larder could not, or would not, even hack it there. He dropped out before completing his first semester. Lardner seems to have stumbled into journalism for want of anything better to do. He began covering sports for the South Bend Tribune in Indiana shortly after his escape from academia and while still a teenager. It turned out to be a good match from the beginning. He had a casual, easy way with words and a knack for telling stories from a just off-center perspective that made him stand out from the beginning from others on the sports beat. 

 

On a personal level, the life of a sports writer had great appeal—he was by necessity out of the office and the constricting supervision of bosses for much of the day. Moreover it was his job to hang out with athletes, attend games, and generally carouse and hobnob with the colorful characters who haunted ball parks, race tracks, and boxing arenas. He loved hotel lobbies, drafty railroad coaches, and saloons—the camaraderie of men in straw boaters and loud suits chomping cigars, swilling whiskey, and telling lies. 

 

It did not take long for Lardner’s talent to get noticed—or for him to take advantage of it. He began a period of frequently changing jobs, each time hoping to better paying and more prestigious newspapers. After six months at the Tribune, he skipped to its competitor the South Bend Times. By 1907 he was in the big town, Chicago where he worked in rapid succession for the lowly Inter-Ocean then moved up to William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, and then to the prestigious Chicago Tribune. By 1900 Lardner was in St. Louis where Taylor Spink of the nationally circulated Sporting News let the writer go beyond reporting on games—by this time he was writing almost exclusively about baseball—and gave him Pullman Pastimes a humor column  based on the off the field conversations and high jinx of players.

 

He was beginning to write in the semi-literate vernacular of the players, Lardner was finding his voice. He continued to contribute to the Sporting News even after moving on to another big city daily, the Boston American. 

 

Sometime in the midst of this game of musical desk chairs, Lardner wooed and won Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana, a town not far from where he started his career in South Bend. The couple wed in 1911 and Ellis gave him four sons and stuck by him even as the normal heavy drinking of a newspaper man became more and more serious. 

 

Perhaps a new wife and family were enough to end his vagabond ways, In 1913 Lardner returned to Chicago and the Tribune where he took over the paper’s flagship sports column In the Wake of the News  after the death of its originator Hugh Keough. He would remain with the paper and the column through 1919 and help make the column a nationwide success syndicated in over 100 newspapers. 

 

It was during this period that Lardner became exceptionally close to the players on the Chicago White Sox, the dominant team of the American League. He began to draw on some of the players for inspiration for a new series of short stories, six of which ran in the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were framed as letters home to a pal by bush league player Jack Keefe who was barely literate about his life in baseball and his rise and travails as a member of the White Sox. The letters were written not only in vernacular but riddled with spelling and grammar errors, just the way such a rube ball player would write. They were also funny as hell, as well as occasionally insightful and even touching. George H. Doran Co., then the nation’s most prestigious publisher with authors like P. G. Wodehouse, Arnold Toynbee, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Virginia Woolf, Frank Harris, H.G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken under contract, was convinced the Post stories could be made into an epistolary novel. 

                                        The original George  H. Doran Co. edition of You Know Me Al later re-issued and re-packaged as serious literature by Scribner's.

Lardner did not believe that they were anything special. He regarded them as ephemera no more enduring than a daily sports column. In order to create a cohesive manuscript, Lardner had to beg the Post to return his original stories to him—he had not bothered to keep copies. When You Know Me Al was first published, it was not a huge immediate success, despite the continuing popularity of the Keefe stories in the Post. But a lot of very serious writers, from Virginia Woolf to the youthful Ernest Hemingway took notice of the book and admired it for both its style and its human depth. 

 

The opening of the first story famously set the table to hear the tale told in Keefe’s voice: 

 

Friend Al: Just a line to let you know I am still on earth. My arm feels pretty good again and I guess maybe I will work in Detroit. Violet writes that she can’t hardly wait to see me. Looks like I got a regular girl now Al. We go up there the twenty-ninth and maybe I won’t be glad to see her. I hope she will be out to the game the day I pitch. I will pitch the way I want to next time and them Tigers won’t have such a picnic. I suppose you seen what the Chicago reporters said about that game. I will punch a couple of their jaws when I see them. Your pal, Jack 

 

Despite the moderate success of the first printing of You Now Me Al, the character and the series remained popular for a long string of more stories in the Post and more collections which were steadily gaining loyal fans. More than one compared his gifts of observation, satire, and the deft use of first person dialect to Mark Twain. As both a sports writer and an almost-against-his-will literary figure, Lardner’s work contrasted with others who tried to bridge those worlds. 

 

Colorado raised Damon Runyon came of age as a newspaperman on the virtual frontier amid colorful sporting men—gamblers, touts, and pimps. When he came to New York City his mentor was an old friend from out West, the gunman and sometime lawman Bat Masterson, who taught him about fixing fights and horse races and introduced him to underworld gangs and gamblers who inhabited the edge of sports. 

 

Grantland Rice, on the other hand, was a son of the Southern aristocracy and a college man. His passions were for intercollegiate athletics, especially football and the gentlemanly game of golf. He saw athletics as a noble contest and athletes as classic heroes embodying the best in civilization. He wrote elegantly, even floridly to lift up his flawless heroes. 

 

Lardner was somewhere in the middle. His game was baseball, a professional sport for decades already played mostly by young men from hardscrabble backgrounds who were in it as much to escape a life of drudgery as for glory. He liked those men. He felt, despite his own privileged background, to be one of them. He always knew there were fixers on the edge, but believed that, on the whole that the spitting, cussing, scratching, and brawling boys of the bench shared a certain code of the game that usually put them out of the reach of the worst connivers. 

Lardner quickly turned around his short stint as a war corespondent into a book that combined stories he filed for  Colliedr's with reflection.

 

Two things changed Lardner’s perspective. The first was first hand exposure to the horrors of World War I. Collier’s Magazine sent Lardner to France to cover the war. He was not a front line correspondent, but he saw enough and talked to enough Doughboys—young soldiers who often resembled his beloved ball players—to be wised up to some brutal truths. Out of this experience Lardner mined a personal memoir, My Four Weeks in France. But he also let Jack Keefe get drafted and shipped off to the trenches which was chronicled by the unfortunate pitcher in more letters to Al in Treat ‘em Rough. 

 

The second thing was the Black Sox Scandal. Lardner had been covering and traveling with the Chicago White Sox for years. Many of White Sox figures, from shrewd and cheap old Charles Comiskey and manager Kid Gleason, were used by name in You Know Me Al and others were only thinly disguised. Lardner became suspicious that something was afoot during the 1919 World Series games against Cincinnati. There was an inexplicable lack of sharpness, particularly on crucial defensive plays and certain pitchers seemed to be offering up batting practice. Some say that Kid Gleason, who had been elevated to manager that year, tipped Lardner off that the series was fixed.

 

Ring Lardner's role in exposing the  1919 Black Sox scandal was central to the film Eight Men Out.  Lardner was portrayed by a virtual doppelganger--screen writer and director John Sales.  Seen here with Studs Terkel as a Tribune sports writer and John Mahoney as Sox manager Kid Gleason.
 

Lardner covered the whole unraveling scandal, including the exile from baseball of players he had considered close friends. He felt betrayed. Ever after his baseball writing, while still rife with humor, took on a darker world view, almost an assumption that on some level the fix was always in. 

 

Lardner was also broadening out from writing just baseball stories. He began contributing other satirical tales to the Post and other magazines which were collected and published to acclaim including Gulible’s Travels in 1917, Own Your Own Home in 1919, The Young Immigrunts in 1920, and The Big Town in 1921.  

You Know Me Al became a popular newspaper comic strip in the 1920's and  Lardner picked up extra income not only for the rights to his stories, but for penning the scripts.

 

Own Your Own Home represented a big change for Lardner. After the Black Sox scandal, he left Chicago to relocate his family to the leafy and tony Hamptons on Long Island. He dropped his daily column but kept up his popular weekly syndicated pieces which he could write from anywhere. The move was made possible by the very comfortable living his work was now providing him. But it was motivated by a long cherished dream of writing plays to be produced on Broadway. 

 

Although not successful on Broadway in a George M. Cohan production starring Walter Huston, Elmer the Great became a big hit in 1933 for Joe E. Brown, a physical comic who had played baseball. 

 

He had mounted an original play back home in Niles, Michigan while still a teenager. Despite his success as a writer, Lardner found producers immune from the charms of his scripts, which were chockfull of nonsense and whimsy and included music and lyrics by the playwright. Some of his sketches and songs were used in various productions of the Ziegfeld Follies including one baseball sketch featuring Will Rogers. In 1928 George M. Cohan produced his baseball comedy Elmer the Great starring Walter Huston, but it was unsuccessful. It was made into a 1933 Joe E. Brown film that was a hit. 

At the White House on the way to a Senators game with President Warren G. Harding, another hard drinking former newspaper man.
 

Finally, in 1930, Lardner had a hit, June Moon written in collaboration with George S. Kauffman for which he also wrote the songs. During his residency in the Hamptons, Lardner spent many evenings in New York City and with the introduction of Prohibition partied hard. He enjoyed the Jazz Age. Young F. Scott Fitzgerald came under his wing and guidance. Lardner was asked to proof drafts of The Great Gatsby in which a character was based on him. In his last novel Tender is the Night, Lardner was depicted as the drunken Abe North at a fatal party. 

 

In the mid-‘20s Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s legendary editor at a Scribner’s became convinced that Lardner should be re-packaged as a writer from comic relief to a serious, if humorous short story writer. Scribner’s obtained rights to Lardner’s earlier books and re-issued them in a uniform series to highlight their importance. That included a new edition of You Can Call Me Al which had inexplicably gone out of print. Now presented as literary fiction, it found new and appreciative audiences. Perkins helped guide the story collections of the late ‘20s that included many of Lardner’s most admired. The wry title of the first of these collections How to Write Short Stories was suggested by Fitzgerald who knew that Lardner still harbored a lingering suspicion he was a fraud as far as a literary figure goes. 

 

But stories like the gripping, tragic Haircut from his 1926 collection The Love Nest and Other Stories showed that Lardner was indeed the master of the short story, a literary form that flourished for a time in this country. Lardner continued to write successfully. In addition to his general interest short stories, he wrote a satirical autobiography The Return of Wonderman in 1927 and returned to baseball in 1933 with Lose With a Smile. 

 

But years of heavy drinking and carousing were taking a toll on his health. At home his wife tried to care for him and he did pay attention to his four sons, all of whom he made sure had had the best educations—the kind he had purposefully escaped from—at prestigious Ivy League schools. Drinking affected his heart and he suffered at least one heart attack. He was sent to a sanitarium in Arizona to dry out and also recover from symptoms of tuberculosis in 1931 and sought similar treatment in California two years later. When it became apparent he did not have long to live, he returned to his home in the Hamptons where he died in his sleep surrounded by his wife and two of his sons on September 23, 1933 at the age of 48. 

 

Lardner's four sons--John and Jim on top, Ring Jr. and David on the bottom--as young men. All went on to successful careers as journalists and writers but were stalked by tragedy. Jim died fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, David was killed as a World War II war correspondent,  and Oscar winning screen writer Ring Jr. spent a year in prison as one of the Hollywood 10 and was blacklisted for work in films for years. 

 

His heritage as a newspaper man and writer, as well as someone with a deep sense of the injustices of the world, was carried on by his four sons. The eldest, John Lardner, born in 1912 became a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune in Paris before returning to the States to become a sports columnist for Newsweek and a World War II war correspondent. James Lardner was also an accomplished journalist who gave it up to enlist in the International Brigades fighting fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in Spain. 

 

 The most famous of the brothers, Ring Lardner, Jr. was a leading Hollywood screen writer whose work included Woman of the Year, a film that won him an Academy Award for Original Screenplay in 1942, Laura in 1944, Brotherhood of Man in 1946, and Forever Amber in 1947. Later in ’47 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for supposed Communist connections but refused to name names. He became one of the famous Hollywood 10 and spent a year in prison. Blacklisted in Hollywood he moved to England where he worked under a variety of pseudonyms. When the Blacklist was finally broken he worked on such classic films as The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H, for which he won a second Oscar. He died in New York City in 2000, the last surviving member of the Hollywood 10. 

 

The youngest son, David Lardner worked for The New Yorker as a general reporter and war correspondent before he was killed by a landmine near Aachen, Germany in October 1944, less than one month after his arrival in Europe.

Thomas Wolfe was the Novelist Who Could Not Go Home Again to Ashville

 

Thomas Wolfe's hometown and inspiration, Ashville, North Carolina, remains isolated by flood waters and destroyed highway access with widespread catastrophic damage a week after Hurricane Helene slammed the Piedmont highlands.

Note—The fate of novelist Thomas Wolfe’s childhood home and museum as well as other sites associated with his roman-a-clef novels in Ashville, North Carolina is not yet known.  Days after being devastated by Hurricane Helene the gem of the Piedmont remains isolated accessible only by air, foot, and boats.  Aerial footage of the devastation is not hopeful.  Now perhaps even Wolfe’s ghost cannot go home again.

It was 1966.  With typical ambition Elaine Zelznick, the young drama teacher and theater director at Niles West High School in Skokie, Illinois had selected a noted Broadway serious drama as the class play.  Look Homeward, Angel was a bittersweet but lyrical evocation of life in an early 20th Century small Southern city as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young man coming of age.  Ketti Frings adapted the well-known novel.  The play earned six Tony Award nominations and the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The leading role of Eugene Gant naturally went to the school’s acknowledged star Murray Moss, who both he and Miss Zelznick were convinced was the next Marlon Brando.  And he dazzled delivering lines of dialog that could and did move an audience to awe and tears.  I was given a small part as a townsman—so small that I can’t remember who I was playing.  Certainly less than six lines of dialogue.  But I was thrilled to be a part of a project that everyone involved took with high minded artistic convictions.

Joe Van Fleet as mother and Anthony Perkins as the stone carver's son Eugene Gant in the 1958 Broadway production of Look Homeward, Angel.

The Samuel French script from which we work noted that the play was based on a novel by someone named Thomas Wolfe.  I had never heard of him, but I searched out the fat book.  I found a paperback copy among my mother’s large collection of important or bestselling novels.  One evening I opened it up the book to the prelude:

. . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

 

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

 

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

 

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

 

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I was blown away as only a 17 year old can be blown away.  Awe struck.  I had never read prose like that.  I read all night getting maybe 200 hundred pages into the thickest novel I had ever seen.  And my life literally changed.  I wanted to do that.  I wanted more than anything to write with that kind of power and grandeur.  I wanted to be the next Thomas Wolfe, the next Great American novelist.

I was not the only one.  Wolfe had that effect on a lot of people, most notably Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth each of whom adored him.  Pat Conroy may have summed it up for the rest of them, “My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel.”

Of course, I never became a novelist, let alone a great one.  But I did spend years writing short stories that tried to capture that eloquence in a bottle.  But no one could match Wolfe, and it was fatal to try.  Would-be lyrical passages were too often simply florid and excessive.  It took time and a heavy dose of Ernest Hemmingway’s economical and pared down prose to strip the worst of it from my writing.

But regular readers of this blog and other scribblings might sometimes detect echoes of that rich and evocative language.  Forgive me.  Like malaria, you never quite get over Thomas Wolfe.

Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900 in the North Carolina Piedmont city of Asheville.  He was the youngest of eight and the closest child to his ambitious and domineering mother, the former Julia Elizabeth Westall.  She kept an upscale boarding house and dabbled, eventually successfully, in real estate.  His father William Oliver Wolfe was already 50 years old when his youngest son was born, and a decade older than his wife.  He was a stone carver and owned a monument company.  Both of them and his siblings became key characters in his autobiographical first novel.

The relationship between his parents had cooled.  When Julia Wolfe returned from a successful stay in St. Louis where she had operated a boarding house serving visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair, she used the money she had earned to buy a large new boarding house she named Old Kentucky Home at 48 Spruce Street in Asheville.  Julia moved in there with young Thomas while his father and the other children stayed in their old home.

The boy grew up in that house amid the mix of lodgers and visitors and the tension between his parents.  He idolized his father and his older brothers, particularly Ben, his closest sibling in age who was eight years older.  The boy must have been a sponge.  He absorbed it all, as well as life in Asheville and many of the town’s residents.

                             Wolfe in a University of North Carolina yearbook.

Wolfe was precocious enough, and his family prosperous enough, to enroll him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 15.  Despite his youth he was both a popular student and an academic standout.  He was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity.  He was recognized as an outstanding writer, rose to the editorship of the Daily Tar Heel, and was awarded a prize for a philosophic essay.

After the trauma of his brother Ben’s early death in 1918, Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting class.  The future master of descriptive prose was inspired to become a dramatist.  The Return of Buck Gavin his first one act play was one of the first produced by the newly formed Carolina Playmakers.  The troupe also staged another of his plays, The Third Night.

Wolfe graduated in 1920 and went on to Harvard University for graduate studies that fall where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Baker’s 47 Workshop, a student theatrical group which mounted plays developed in his classes, did two separate versions of Wolfe’s The Mountains in 1921.

Wolf earned his Master’s Degree in June of 1922.  His father died the same month, another shattering experience for the young man.  Despite the loss, he returned to Harvard for another year of work under Baker.  The 47 Workshop produced his most ambitious work yet, a 10 scene Welcome to Our City in May 1923.  The play drew attention beyond the University community.

In 1923 Wolfe received a modest stipend to go to New York City as a fund raiser for his original alma mater, the University of North Carolina.  The job left plenty of time for the young writer to try to peddle his plays to producers.  He had no luck.   In ’24 he took a teaching position at New York University, which would somewhat sporadically be his academic home for the next seven years.

For a short while in 1924 it looked like the Theater Guild might be willing to produce Welcome to Our City, but it was eventually rejected as too long and unwieldy.  Wolfe could not bring himself to cut the script to a more manageable length. 

Somewhat discouraged in October of ’24 Wolfe sailed for England and the Continent to expand his provincial horizons and work on his writing.  He had concluded that his talents lay not as a playwright, but as a novelist.  

                            Aline Bernsten, Wolfe's older lover and mentor.

Sailing home to New York in 1925 Wolfe met the beautiful, sophisticated, and intelligent older “Jewess” who became a tempestuous lover, muse, and mentor.  Aline Bernstein was a noted costume designer for the Theater Guild and the married mother of two.  She was 18 years older than her protégée.  The relationship was sometimes stormy and always intense.  But Bernstein encouraged the writer and promoted his career.  She became the model for Esther Jack, an important character in Wolf’s last three novels.

With her encouragement, Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926 where he began work on his highly experimental first epic novel, O Lost.  He completed a draft back in New York.  Aline helped get it into the hands Scribner’s, the most important literary publishing house in the country, already the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway.  His 1,100 page manuscript landed on the desk of the most respected editor in the business, Maxwell Perkins. 

Perkins immediately recognized that the book needed significant paring.  Despite Wolfe’s anguish, he cut well over half of the text, eliminating most of the experimental elements and concentrating on the autobiographical character of Eugene Gant.  Despite the ruthless editing, Wolfe grew close to Perkins and came to regard him as a surrogate father.  Perkins returned the affection and treated Wolfe like a son.

And not everything cut was lost.  Much of the material became the core of a second novel.

Legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins tamed a literal crate full of Wolfe's manuscript into Look Homeward, Angel and became a father figure to the writer. 

The book was published under the new title of Look Homeward, Angel just days before the stock market crash of 1929.  That might have affected sales.  The initial publication was only a modest commercial success.  But it was a critical triumph.  Praise was almost unanimous and unusually effusive, although some critics like Bernard DeVoto would come to praise Perkins’s editing over Wolfe’s undisciplined genius.  DeVoto later described the book as “hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribner’s.”

The publication certainly changed Wolfe’s life.  He was shocked by the angry reaction of his hometown of Asheville where over 200 of his family members and neighbors recognized themselves as characters in the novel.  Most were not pleased.  It caused a rift in his family, especially with his prickly mother.  Only one sister remained supportive.  He was the target of such invective that Wolfe was afraid to return to Asheville for eight years.

He dedicated the book to Bernstein but broke off his relationship with her shortly after it came out.  Depressed and drinking heavily Wolfe left for Europe supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.  There he found a warmer reception with the public.  The book was a best seller in England and its dense style meshed with German literary tastes.

Portrait of a young author. The poster boy for tortured genius novelists, Thomas Wolfe hemorrhaged gorgeous prose, lush descriptive passages, and sharp characterizations that others hammered into readable books.

Upon return using unpublished fragments of the first book and lots of new material, he produced another massive manuscript The October Fair continuing the story of Eugene Gant as he establishes a literary career and prominently featuring Esther Jack.  It was an arduous, four year process.  Wolfe worked in his Brooklyn apartment, writing long hand on legal tablets standing up and using the top of his refrigerator as a desk.

Once again Perking managed to wrest a single volume, Of Time and the River. The book was not only a critical success this time, but a popular one as well.  It shot to the top of the best seller lists in 1936.  Wolfe was acclaimed as one of the great writers of his generation, if not the greatest.  Peers like Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner joined in the chorus of cheers.

After the success of his second novel, Wolfe returned to Asheville for a visit with great trepidation.  He posed with his aging mother with whom he had a difficult, prickly relationship on the porch of her boarding house The Old Kentucky Home.

When the book became a success, Wolfe heard once again from Asheville. It turned out that people this time felt snubbed that they were left out of the new book.  And there were still whispers that Perkins was the Svengali behind the writer.

Despite their continued personal affection and friendship, this caused a professional rupture.  Wolfe abandoned Scribner’s for Harper Bros. and a new editor, Edward Aswell.

While working on a new manuscript with his autobiographical doppelganger’s name changed to George Webber, Wolfe returned to Europe, spending significant time in Germany where his work was especially admired.  But on this trip Wolfe became alarmed by the open persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime.

Unlike other writers, Wolfe had never been very political, but on his return from Europe he felt compelled to speak out.  He published a widely read and influential short story I Have a Thing to Tell You in the mildly leftist The New Republic.

In 1938 Wolfe delivered another huge, amorphous manuscript about George Webber on Aswell’s desk.  He then embarked on a western train tour that began with a lecture at Indiana University and continued on a long dreamed of tour of western National Parks and Monuments. 

My friend and fellow worker Utah Phillips quoted Wolfe’s longings in the spoken word introduction to his railroad song masterpiece Starlight on the Rails.

Oh, I will go up and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?

It was the trip of a lifetime and Wolfe was taking copious notes and writing sketches for the inclusion in a future book.  But he fell ill with a serious repertory infection and was hospitalized in Seattle.  Pneumonia filled his lungs and he did not respond to treatment. 

His worried sister Mable closed the boarding house she was running in Washington to be with him.  She brought him back across the country for treatment at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where doctors were planning emergency surgery to relieve pressure on the brain from fluid buildup.  Before slipping into a coma Wolfe dictated a last fond message to Perkins. 

The brain operation revealed significant damage to the right side of the brain from miliary tuberculosis.  On September 6, 1938 Wolfe died less than a month before his 38th birthday.  His body was returned at last to Asheville where it was laid in a family plot beside his parents and siblings.

At Harper’s Aswell carved two novels from Wolfe’s final manuscript, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again published in 1939 and ’40 respectively.  Both were critical and popular successes.

A 2000 commemorative U.S. Postage Stamp honoring Wolfe.

Aline Bernstein also had a large number of Wolfe manuscripts, mostly short stories and fragments of planned longer works that he had abandoned with her following their break-up.  Much of that material was published posthumously over the years in various forms.

Despite the high esteem in which he was held when he died, by the ‘50s his reputation was in steep decline with harsh criticism by Hemmingway characterizing him as “the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature.”  Former admirer Faulkner also became critical.  Academic writers could not neatly place him in a continuing tradition, expect acknowledging him as a pioneer of autobiographical fiction.  His elaborate style seemed passé.

Wolfe has nearly disappeared from college literature surveys and anthologies. 

But many of us will always love him.  And there are signs of a critical reassessment.  Matthew Bruccoli, best known as a Fitzgerald Scholar recreated as far as possible from surviving manuscripts the original version of O Lost, the book from which Perkins extracted Look Homeward, Angel.  Many now understand Wolfe’s original vision, and some have even come to consider the sprawling experiment greater than the familiar novel.

In 2016 Michael Grandage directed an award winning film, Genius, based on the relationship of Wolfe and Perkins.  Written by John Logan and based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, The film stared Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Wolfe, Nicole Kidman as Bernstein, Dominic West as Hemingway, and Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.  

Jude Law as Wolfe and Colin Firth as Perkins in the 2016 film Genius.

Yet the film for all of its prestigious pedigree was a critical failure and hemorrhaged red ink in both Britain and the U.S. where it was little seen outside of a handful of art houses and theaters in University towns.  A reviewer in Variety summed up the problem, “…it’s nobody’s idea of interesting to watch someone wield his red pencil over the pile of pages that would become Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.”  Too bad….

Back in Asheville, Wolfe’s childhood home, the boarding house his mother called Old Kentucky Home, is now a state owned monument and museum.  A Thomas Wolfe Society keeps his memory alive in an academic journal, with frequent conferences, and by making awards of the Wolfe Scholarship.