SOURCE: "Wolfe's 'No Door' and the Brink of Discovery," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXI, No. 3, Fall, 1967, pp. 319-27.

In the following essay, Eichelberger analyzes Wolfe's short novel No Door, calling it "his most effectively controlled presentation of the dominant theme of loneliness and aloneness which stands central to his life and work."

Initial contact with the immensity of the novels of Thomas Wolfe sometimes so overwhelms the reader that he has difficulty from that moment on thinking of Wolfe as the author of anything other than his four major works. Yet to reduce the contribution of Wolfe to these major novels is to disregard some of his best and most disciplined work such as The Web of Earth and No Door. No Door, especially, is a case in point, for critics have almost entirely ignored it. In her biography of Wolfe, Elizabeth Nowell mentions it in passing...