Doesn't Anyone Read Thomas Wolfe Anymore?

One of the interesting and obvious advantages of running a bookshop is that you begin to have a sense of what the public is reading these days. Now, admittedly, an antiquarian bookshop is unlike a 'new-book' store, inasmuch as the customer base is a bit different, and generally visitors to our shop are not expecting to find a large selection of new releases or even shelves of paperback reprints of the classics of modern literature. Nonetheless, one does get a sense of what's being read, as well as collected, and the students from Washington College add to the variety of tastes. It is just as interesting to consider what is not being read. Some authors stay on the shelves an overlong period of time, except for the brief intervals when I pick them up and re-read their work. So who are these neglected 'modernists'?

Several come to mind right away. John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, James T. Farrell, John O'Hara, Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, and Malcolm Lowry to name a handful. I've had James Baldwin stay on the shelf undisturbed for a long time, and what a pity that is. Edmund Wilson wrote such marvellous essays as well as fiction, and his books are dusty as well. Gertrude Stein is still there, along with E.E. Cummings. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't exactly run out the front door either, nor do Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis or Nathanael West.

Hemingway and Faulkner occasionally sell, and Steinbeck, but not Thomas Wolfe. No, not Thomas Wolfe. But why? To what do we owe this neglect of the stalwarts of American literature? To be sure, no one reads as much as in past decades anyway, and tastes change. If one tries to keep up with new titles released each year, well, there goes the time to read the 'classics'. Too much computer time, TV time, and less actual leisure time, all contribute of course. And there is a tendency among us to regard these books as 'having been read'. "Oh, I read that as a college freshman." Do we seriously think it will be the same book if we read it again this afternoon?

The other day a customer was browsing the fiction shelves and I overheard him say to his partner: " Look, Thomas Wolfe's novels. Nobody reads Thomas Wolfe anymore." Well, perhaps. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't read him. Yes, his books are lengthy, a bit disorganized, and maybe could have withstood another editing session. But try this from You Can't Go Home Again:

"I believe we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me - and I think for all of us - not our only hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us - the forms we have made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created - was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America, and the people in it, are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live."

Well Thomas Wolfe knew a thing or two, as young as he was. And so did the others who share the shelves with him. Their writing is just as relevant today as it was yesterday. Perhaps even more so.