In 1936, Thomas Wolfe published a small book called The Story of a Novel, in which he described the composition of his second novel, Of Time and the River (which had been published the year before), rhapsodized about the history and mystery of his creative gift, and, in general, sang himself. Two years later he returned to the same vineyard and emerged with a somewhat smaller pressing of the same vintage. He called this second exercise in self-celebration “Writing and Living,” and—in what turned out to be his last public appearance—presented it as a lecture at Purdue University in the summer of 1938. More than two decades afterward, in 1962, professors William Braswell and Leslie Field of Purdue added an introduction, copious textual notes, and two extensive appendices and published the lecture as a book to which they gave the flat but accurate title Thomas Wolfe’s Purdue Speech: “Writing and Living.”

Now, the same Professor Field has brought these two small books together, omitted the scholarly apparatus, and formed yet another small book, to which he has given the catchy if rather misleading title The Autobiography of an American Novelist. Granted, these are works of personal reminiscence, and The Story of a Novel—by far the better known and more interesting of the two pieces—is in part an American success story in the manner of Moss Hart’s Act One and Norman Podhoretz’s Making It.[1]In classic smalltown-boy-makes-good style, Wolfe describes the longing to create