Letters--mostly of the nuts-and-bolts, practical variety--between Thomas Wolfe and his literary agent, Elizabeth Nowell. Nowell served as Wolfe's editor for many of his short stories, paring them down to make them acceptable to magazines. Oddly enough, his attitude toward her was grateful rather than adversarial, and their deep mutual respect is clearly evident in these letters.
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Along with Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, Edward Estlin Cummings is one of the leading American poets who revolutionized literary expression in the twentieth century. He was also a Cubist painter, a champion of the little man, a brilliant conversationalist, a romantic idealist, a famous irrational curmudgeon, and husband to three of the most beautiful women of his time. This critical biography merges these various selves into one fascinating life story, many chapters of which could be mistaken for a great romantic novel. In following Cummings's development as a poet, it also includes a large number of previously unpublished poems and drawings.

This is an altogether engaging collection of ruminations on early New Orleans writers -- George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate Chopin -- as well as three prolific twentieth-century authors who called the Crescent City "home" at various times: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy. In the book's final essay, Lewis P. Simpson reflects on the history of New Orleans as a literary center, giving special emphasis to Percy's The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

One of the most enduring characters in Thomas Wolfe's fiction is Francis Starwick, the Midwestern aesthete who befriends Eugene Grant at Harvard in Wolfe's second autobiographical novel, Of Time and the River. Wolfe created Starwick in order to provide a foil for the artistic development of Eugene: Starwick was the pretentious, narrow-minded dilettante whose response to the arts is all talk and pose, as compared with Eugene, who hopes to express in writing his intensity of feeling about all aspects of life

While writing the novel, however, Wolfe found his manuscript proliferating beyond his control, and he turned to his editor at Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, for help in shaping the final version of the book. In the process of organizing the massive manuscript for publication, Perkins deleted some of the analyses of Starwick's behavior and several of the episodes involving Eugene and Starwick. The result was that the relationship between the two young men was not as fully developed as Wolfe had originally planned.

Richard S. Kennedy discovered these excised passages among the Wolfe papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library. In The Starwick Episodes has arranged them sequentially and indicated their position in the original manuscript. IN one of them Starwick introduces Eugene to Joyce's Ulysses, and in another he takes him to view the paintings in Boston' Museum of Fine Arts. Additional scenes find the two exploring the lower depts. Of Paris until at length their true sexual natures are revealed in a visit to a Parisian brothel.

Kennedy's research also uncovered the story of the life of Kenneth Raisbeck, the young man whom Wolfe used as the starting point for his fictional creation of Starwick. In his Introduction, Kennedy describes Raisbeck's career, both its brilliant promise and its tragic end, and his similarity to the character in the novel.

The presence of Starwick in Of Time and the River is unforgettable despite the omission of some important scenes that Wolfe wrote for him. With the publication now of the deleted episodes, readers may gain an enriched sense of Wolfe's fascinating creation and a fuller understanding of what he was trying to convey.

Twayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.

Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work.

Each volume features:

-- A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works

-- A brief biography of the author

-- An accessible chronology outlining the life, the work, and relevant historical context

-- Aids for further study: complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography and an index

-- A readable style presented in a manageable length