A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.
 
Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.
 
Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.
 
Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.
 
Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.

Mark Canada is a professor of English and the executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at Indiana University Kokomo. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of five books, including Introduction to Information Literacy for Students and Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press. His work has appeared in American Literary Realism, Journalism History, and other venues.
 
Nami Montgomery is an ESL specialist in the Office of International Programs at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

"[The Editors] purpose involves providing an appreciation for the brilliantly gifted but troubled man behind the masterful fiction. Wolfe's personal eccentricities, his qualities and flaws, and above all his amazing vitality, emerge in this fine collective mosaic:
—The Alabama Review

"Similar in approach to William Faulkner of Oxford, ed. by James Webb and A. Wigfall Green (1965), and Andre Dubus: Tributes, ed. by Donald Anderson (2001), the present volume captures the memories of people who knew Wolfe (1900–38), including family members, friends, and editors. Although most of the reminiscences included have already appeared in print, many come from specialized journals that may not be easily available. A number of unpublished narratives come from major Wolfe collections at the libraries of Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized chronologically, the book includes 46 anecdotes and narratives, a chronology, a dozen illustrations, two lists of remembrances, and notes. Among the contributors are Wolfe's mother (Julia Wolfe), editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, Wolfe collector William Wisdom, Wolfe's teacher Margaret Roberts, his agent and biographer Elizabeth Nowell, and dramatist Paul Green. Part of the series "American Writers Remembered," edited by Jackson Bryer, this volume has an appeal that goes beyond Wolfe specialists to serious readers. These memories about one of the most significant writers of the 20th century cover a range of experiences, including a dinner with writers at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans." Recommended.
—CHOICE

"Thomas Wolfe Remembered is lively and informative, providing many insights for understanding Wolfe’s rich and complex art and life. It’s a very welcome and important addition to Wolfe scholarship and will no doubt greatly appeal to both Wolfe scholars and general readers.”  
—Robert Brinkmeyer, author of The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 and Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West