Of Time and the River: A Legend of Mans Hunger in His Youth.

WOLFE, Thomas.

Item Number: 114482

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935.

Early printing of the author’s fictionalized autobiography, detailing his early to mid 20s. Octavo, original cloth. From the library of American actor Zachary Scott, the first husband of Elaine Scott who later married John Steinbeck. Scott is best remembered for his many roles as villains and “mystery men” in dozens of musical comedies, film noirs, and psychological thrillers throughout the 1940s and 50s including Hollywood Canteen, The Unfaithful, Shotgun, Man in the Shadow, and The Young One. In very good condition with Scott’s bookplate to the pastedown.

“On the night of the 14th of December [1933], at about half-past eleven, Wolfe arrived customarily late for his appointment with [editor Max] Perkins… [and] unloaded a heavy bundle on his editor’s desk. It was wrapped in brown paper, twice tied with string, and stood two feet high. Perkins opened it and found it packed with typescript—more than 3000 rough-draft pages, the first part of the novel. The sheets, all different kinds of paper, were not consecutively numbered, since the sections had not been consecutively written… ‘You have often said that if I ever gave you something that you could get your hands on and weigh in its entirety from beginning to end, you could pitch in and help me to get out of the woods,’ Wolfe wrote Perkins the following day. ‘Well now here is your chance… I don’t envy you the job before you” (Berg, Max Perkins, 235). Thus the editing of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River began. Upon its highly-anticipated publication two years later, the New York Times called the novel “a magnificent epic of American life” and Malcolm Crowley named Thomas Wolfe “the only contemporary American writer who can be mentioned in the same breath with Dickens and Dostoevsky” (New Republic).