UNC Press - The Good Child's River

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332 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 25 illus.

H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series

Paper

ISBN 978-0-8078-4457-1

Published: February 1994

The Good Child's River

By Thomas Wolfe

Edited and with an introduction by Suzanne Stutman

For the last eight years of his life, Thomas Wolfe worked periodically on a series of chapters that were part of a huge work-in-progress. The work was based loosely on the early life of New York stage and costume designer Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was engaged in a tempestuous love affair for eleven years. In her introduction, Suzanne Stutman points out that publication of this novel should finally lay to rest the myth that Wolfe could write only about himself. Although some sections of this work were heavily edited and published after Wolfe's death, The Good Child's River, as Wolfe wrote it, was not published until 1991 and is now available in paperback for the first time.

About the Author

Suzanne Stutman, editor of My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, is professor of English and American studies at Pennsylvania State University, Ogontz Campus. She is currently completing editorial work on The Party at Jack's, another Wolfe manuscript.

Reviews

"Shows Thomas Wolfe at his boldest, richest, and most poetic. . . . Readers who come fresh to it, never before having read Wolfe, may well be stunned by his power, and may start questioning the skinny little sentences and squeaks of feeling in today's writers. The rest of us will be replenished and exhilarated. Nobody writes for full orchestra any more."
--Christian Science Monitor

"Reading these lyrical, effusive pages is to take an invigorating plunge in the swarming sea of Wolfe's imagination."
--Publishers Weekly

"Wolfe's stature as an artist is heightened by the publication of this book. The quality of much of Wolfe's writing here is remarkable: it is rich, poetic, realistic, pictorial, dramatic, nearly always disciplined and lucid. Wolfe rarely wrote better than he often does here."
--John L. Idol, Clemson University

"In this Wolfe material one sees the power, imagination, creativity, and the raw genius of Wolfe at work as he recreates Edith Wharton's and Henry James's New York, primarily from the vantage point of the New York Jewish community, the artistic and upper-class community, [and] the artsy-theater community. . . . Stutman has done a masterful job of weighing the pros and cons of what Wolfe has wrought here."
--Leslie Field, Purdue University

"Wolfe creates an opulent picture of life in New York City at the turn of the century."
--Greensboro News and Record