"I am ... a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me...." These words by Thomas Wolfe open the picture-story book The Lost World of Thomas Wolfe . They capsulize his life and art, which are often inseparable. Actually, the brief statement seems tailor-made for this author, who is perhaps the most autobiographical American novelist of our time.

By many objective standards he ranks among the significant practitioners of fiction in the twentieth century along with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis. In their Nobel Award talks, both Faulkner and Lewis praised him effusively, and the reading public soon echoed these voices. Critics, however, have been ambivalent about his fiction, but even they have never indifferently dismissed it.

Wolfe was a romantic who, especially in his early work, moved from a preoccupation with himself to his family, his friends, his town, his America, and finally to...