Abstract

Thomas Wolfe, Autobiographer

This article presents information about the book "The Web and the Rock," by Thomas Wolfe. "The Web and the Rock" is an autobiography full of ruptures and incontiences and pondering again those poetic truisms about time and love and death which are as close as Wolfe could come to thinking and as much philosophy as the egocentric adolescent ever needs. Wolfe's real weakness was not that he dramatized his life, but that the writer dramatized it even more than the man. The man suffered; the writer merely exulted in the suffering. The whole body of Wolfe's work, marvelous as fragments of it are, betrays the amateur and the adolescent. Wolfe belonged to the high-pitched, unreal 1920's; their injunction to live fully, to seize all experience, perfectly fitted his need.