The Party at Jack's: A Novella - Hardcover

Wolfe, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080782206X ISBN 13: 9780807822067

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995

Synopsis

In the summer of 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the North Carolina mountains revising a piece about a party and subsequent fire at the Park Avenue penthouse apartment of the fictional Esther and Frederick Jack. He wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, 'I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I've ever written.' Abridged and edited versions of the story were published twice, as a novella in Scribner's Monthly (May 1939) and as part of You Can't Go Home Again (1940). Now Suzanne Stutman and John Idol have worked from manuscript sources at Harvard University to reconstruct The Party at Jack's as outlined by Wolfe before his death. Here, in its untruncated state, Wolfe's novella affords a significant glimpse of a Depression-era New York inhabited by Wall Street wheelers and dealers and the theatrical and artistic elite. Wolfe describes the Jacks and their social circle with lavish attention to mannerisms and to clothing, furnishings, and other trappings of wealth and privilege. The sharply drawn contrast between the decadence of the party-goers and the struggles of the working classes in the streets below reveals Wolfe's gifts as both a writer and a sharp social critic.

About this title

Book Description:

"I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I've ever written."--Thomas Wolfe, to his agent, Elizabeth Nowell

About the Author:

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 080782206X
• ISBN 13: 9780807822067
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 274