Thomas Wolfe

It was on this day in 1935 that Thomas Wolfe's novel Of Time and the River was published (books by this author). Wolfe's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Wolfe brought Perkins a draft of Of Time and the River in December of 1933, it was more than one million words long, and still growing. The first installment alone was two feet high.

For a year, Perkins and Wolfe met almost every day, Sunday nights included, to work through the manuscript. During that time, Hemingway invited his editor to join him in Key West, but Perkins declined, writing: "I am engaged in a kind of life and death struggle with Mr. Thomas Wolfe." Wolfe sat beside his desk while Perkins read through every page, red pencil in hand. He slashed many of the pages from corner to corner. Wolfe never gave up arguing with the deletions, and he frequently appeared in Perkins' office with several thousand words of new material which Perkins refused.

Despite the huge cuts, Of Time and the River was still 912 pages long. Wolfe dedicated it to Perkins, and even that was almost 100 words long. The book was a commercial success and received mostly good reviews, but Wolfe was wounded by the negative ones, and became convinced that Perkins had ruined his book. He left Perkins for a new editor. Three years later, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 37, he sent his last letter, apologizing to Perkins and thanking him once again.