Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #113298
Cost: $1,200.00

Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

"WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE ALWAYS STRANGERS IN THIS WORLD, AND NEVER COME TO KNOW ONE ANOTHER, AND ARE FULL OF FEAR AND SHAME AND HATE AND FALSENESS, WHEN WHAT WE WANT IS LOVE?"

WOLFE, Thomas. Of Time and the River: A Legend of Hunger in Man's Youth. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. Octavo, original green- and gilt-stamped black cloth, original dust jacket. $1200.

First edition of the sequel to Look Homeward, Angel—"so deep and spacious that it deals with the whole of life."

"On the night of the 14th of December [1933], at about half-past eleven, Wolfe arrived customarily late for his appointment with [his editor, Max] Perkins. He… unloaded a heavy bundle on his editor's desk. It was wrapped in brown paper, twice tied with string, and stood two feet high. Perkins opened it and found it packed with typescript—more than 3000 rough-draft pages, the first part of the novel. The sheets, all different kinds of paper, were not consecutively numbered… 'You have often said that if I ever gave you something that you could get your hands on and weigh in its entirety from beginning to end, you could pitch in and help me to get out of the woods,' Wolfe wrote Perkins the following day. 'Well now here is your chance… I don't envy you the job before you'" (Berg, Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, 235). Thus began the editing process of Wolfe's gargantuan Of Time and the River. Finally published two years later, it was "the most fervently anticipated literary event of the spring season of 1935," going through eight printings in as many months. "Thomas Wolfe's new novel, like Look Homeward, Angel is, to quote Sinclair Lewis, 'so deep and spacious that it deals with the whole of life.'" Johnston A3.1.a. Tiny bookseller ticket.

Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with light rubbing to extremities. A lovely copy.

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