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A Personal Reflection
It was a series of fortuitous events that led to the publication of Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929–1938 (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), so first let me relate the genesis of that project as I remember it. Early in 1982 while rummaging through my extensive collection of Wolfeana,1 I happened upon an interview with Wolfe by Reed Hyands, then a staff reporter for the St. Louis Star-Times, dated September 20, 1935. This interview had been part of my Wolfe holdings for many years—probably acquired during the initial flush of my collecting fervor twenty years earlier, when I was pursuing every conceivable item listed in the Wolfe bibliographies then available—but at that moment forgotten.
I halted my search for whatever I was then looking for and reread the interview. I quickly grew fascinated with this brief encounter with Thomas Wolfe and I immediately began to search for other interviews that I recalled seeing in my collection, devouring them in one pleasurable gulp. I was struck by their sense of immediacy and by the manner in which Wolfe spoke about his work, about his family and friends, and especially about his great love for America, all of which was expressed without artifice or pretense. Not since reading Elizabeth Nowell's edition of Wolfe's letters was I so moved by his honesty, his forthrightness, and his sincerity as an artist. Reading those interviews was like being in the same room with the interviewer, listening to Wolfe as he spoke.
At this time I was helping select material for a special publication of the Thomas Wolfe Society, and it occurred to me that a compilation of a half dozen interviews would make an appropriate Society publication. I anxiously discussed the idea with my friend and mentor, Richard Walser, with whom I had collaborated on a previous book,2 to get his view on the idea. He was quick to agree that such a collection would make “a fetching monograph” for the Society. He cautioned, however, that there might be more interviews overlooked by bibliographers, and
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that it might be well worth our time to make a thorough search before deciding how to present such a collection of interviews.
Over the next four or five months...