Of Time and the River

Contents

Of Time and the River is a 1935 novel by Thomas Wolfe that continues the autobiographical saga begun in Look Homeward, Angel. Set against settings ranging from Asheville, North Carolina to New York City and Europe, the work traces the life and ambitions of narrator Eugene Gant as he confronts art, love, and mortality. The novel engages with contemporaneous literary movements and figures, reflecting connections to Modernist literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the social turmoil of the Great Depression.

Background and Publication

Wolfe wrote the novel in the context of the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by his time at Harvard University, journeys to Paris, interactions with editors at Scribner's, and friendships with writers like Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound. Drafts underwent heavy editing by Perkins, whose work also shaped manuscripts of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms; publishing negotiations involved Charles Scribner's Sons and decisions informed by the market for works like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. Wolfe’s experiences intersected with broader cultural events such as the Roaring Twenties and the artistic communities of Greenwich Village and Montparnasse. The first edition appeared in 1935 amid debates in periodicals like The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine and drew reactions from critics connected to institutions including Columbia University and Yale University.

The narrative follows Eugene Gant as he departs Asheville, North Carolina to pursue education and literary ambition in New York City and abroad, encountering characters whose arcs mirror figures from Wolfe’s life and the lives of contemporaries such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Episodes describe academic life at Harvard University and artistic salons in Paris alongside travels invoking landmarks like Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the Pont Neuf. Love affairs and family crises recall scenes resonant with events in Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway fiction, while personal tragedies evoke public moments including the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and responses animated by activists in Franklin D. Roosevelt's era. The novel culminates in reflections on creation and mortality framed with allusions to works by William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot.

Principal figures include Eugene Gant, a self-portrait of Thomas Wolfe analogous to protagonists in novels by John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis; Esther Jack, inspired by women in Wolfe’s life with echoes of characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zora Neale Hurston; and Eugene's family members modeled after the Wolfe family in Asheville with parallels to families in Sherwood Anderson and Edith Wharton narratives. Supporting characters reflect cultural types found in works by Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy, while cameo figures recall contemporaries like Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, Alfred Kazin, and Graham Greene. The ensemble evokes the social networks of Harlem, SoHo, Chelsea, and Brooklyn as well as European precincts like Montmartre and the Latin Quarter.

Themes include the search for identity, the artist’s vocation, familial obligation, and the passage of time, engaging ideas central to Modernism, Transcendentalism, and the American regionalism debates involving Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Wolfe’s prose displays baroque exuberance and lapses into long, cadenced sentences reminiscent of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, while structurally the book experiments with episodic sequencing akin to James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Imagery draws on Southern Appalachian landscapes, urban skylines of Manhattan, and European monuments like Notre-Dame de Paris and St. Peter's Basilica, linking sensory description to philosophical allusions found in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. Intertextual references connect the novel to plays by Eugene O'Neill, poems by Robert Frost, and essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Contemporary reviews in outlets such as The New York Times, Time (magazine), and The Atlantic mixed admiration for Wolfe’s lyricism with criticism comparing his ambitions to those of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The book influenced mid‑20th‑century novelists including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Philip Roth, and John Updike, and scholars at Harvard, Princeton University, and Columbia University continued debates about Wolfe’s place within the canon alongside discussions of Modernist and Postmodernist trajectories. Editions and manuscripts have been studied by archivists at the New York Public Library, Library of Congress, and Duke University, and adaptations and references appear in works by filmmakers like Orson Welles and playwrights affiliated with Theatre Guild and Lincoln Center. The novel remains taught in courses at Yale University, Brown University, Barnard College, and elsewhere, cited in scholarship alongside studies of American literature, 20th-century literature, and the cultural history of Asheville, North Carolina.

Category:1935 novels Category:American novels Category:Thomas Wolfe