SOURCE: Introduction to The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, in Thomas Wolfe: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Prentice-Hall Inc., 1973, pp. 165-77.

In the following essay, originally published in 1961, Holman studies Wolfe's seven short novels, which he argues represent some of the author's best work, and which "helped to sustain his reputation, demonstrated his artistry and control of his materials, and perhaps instructed his sense of form."

To present a collection of the short novels of Thomas Wolfe will seem to many of his readers a quixotic or even a perverse act, for Wolfe exists in the popular fancy and even in the opinion of many of his most devoted admirers as the fury-driven author of a vast but incomplete saga of one man's pilgrimage on earth, a saga so formless that the term novel can be applied to its parts only with...