SOURCE: "Wolfe's Use of Folklore," in New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 3, Autumn, 1960, pp. 203-15.

In the following essay, Field identifies extensive uses of folklore in Thomas Wolfe's fragmentary novel The Hills Beyond, particularly in Wolfe's portrayal of the family's larger-than-life patriarch.

For most students of Wolfe, The Hills Beyond¹ is a postscript to his total work. Ironically, the plan for this book appears first as an actual postscript to a letter which Wolfe wrote his mother in 1934. In the postscript Wolfe asks his mother to "jot down" a brief history of her family.

I would just like . . . [Wolfe adds] to get a list of the twenty children or more that your grandfather had by his two marriages and what happened to them and where they settled and what parts of the country they moved to, and so forth. . . .

I'm asking you to do this because some...