Sublime

Tom Wolfe.”

Before leaving, Wolfe scrounged for a pencil, then scribbled on the wall of the vestibule: THOMAS WOLFE LIVED HERE.

The city fascinated Wolfe, and when he was not working, he enjoyed nothing more than walking through every part of town with his editor.

Wolfe now moved into a new apartment at 865 First Avenue, just two blocks toward the East River from the Perkinses’ house.

Since almost every word Wolfe wrote was autobiographical, nearly all his characters based closely on real people, there had always been a risk of prosecution.

Clean Old-fashioned Hate

There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”

The death of Wolfe’s father in 1922, when Tom was earning his Master of Arts degree at Harvard, so traumatized the author that it took hundreds of pages in graphic detail before he wrote it out of his system.

Despite his overbearing appearance, Wolfe was by nature shy; for all his grace on paper, he was maladroit in person. “When I am with someone like Scott I feel that I am morose and sullen—and violent in my speech and movement part of the time,” Tom admitted to Perkins. “Later I feel that I have repelled them.”