The three books rescued in this edition do indeed merit publication, even if Wolfe was recycling some materials. They are rich, varied, evocative of time and place, and abounding in characters that Wolfe either created from scratch, for example, Nebraska Crane, or had but skimpily developed in the Gant novels, a notable one being Gerald Alsop, who had merely a cameo role in O Lost under another name, Jack Harvey, a fictional version of John Skally Terry. No doubt the richest, most varied and evocative book is the first. Its four chapters introduce us to George Webber’s world, his Joyner and Webber kin, the Joyners linked to southern Appalachia, John Webber (George’s father) to Pennsylvania, the same ancestral heritage of Eugene Gant. But here Wolfe, commenting on mountain-bred civilization, delves far more deeply and concretely into narrowness, clannishness, bigotry, hypocrisy, religion, moral values, superstitions, and beliefs in the occult than he had in the Gant cycle. It is a world that Mark Joyner in Book II will vividly expose and roundly condemn. It is a world that George rejects in favor of the envisioned Golden City of the North. Yet it is a world that Wolfe readers must examine and study if they are to understand the forces that helped shape him. A sense of place emerges graphically and powerfully here in Book I, and to rush through Wolfe’s wrestling with his mountain heritage is to miss a vital element in his cultural background. His roots indeed run deep in Blue Ridge soil. His lover’s quarrel with his native region adds vinegar, and sometimes gall, to his depiction of mountain folk, including thinly disguised members of his own family.
Although some passages about these mountain folk—these “grills,” as W. O. Gant would have called them—read more like sociological notes than facts transformed into fiction, Wolfe enables readers to discern the web George must escape if he is to find his way to the Golden City and become the writer he longs to be. Happily, sociology gives way to character presentation and dramatized events as Wolfe moves to trace the enlarging circles of George’s world: his friendship with Nebraska Crane, a part Cherokee boy who later becomes a professional baseball player; his disgust with and loathing of white-trash boys from the Doubleday section of town; his resentment that Aunt Maw would interrupt his reveries to ask him to do a mere chore; his encounter with Jerry Alsop at Pine Rock College (another, less favorable, rendering of the University of North Carolina) over whether Charles Dickens or Feodor Dostoevski was the greater writer; his admiration and adulation of a star athlete, Jim Randolph, who was based on William Folger, a star performer at the Citadel and later the University of North Carolina; his further disagreement with Alsop about the greatest men since Jesus Christ, Alsop’s candidates being Woodrow Wilson and the saintly and morally stern president of Pine Rock College; his life among a group of young Southern men trying to find their way in New York City and his conclusion, that Jim Randolph, their ostensible leader, was truly a member of the Lost Generation; and, finally, his decision to go his own way, to use his powers and talents to the utmost to win recognition and fame in the Golden City. As a means of rounding out George’s journey from daydreamer to his hope of becoming a successful, celebrated, and loved author, Aswell closed out Book III with a fantasy Wolfe had written much earlier, setting it in Boston and casting it as part of Eugene Gant’s means of coping with his lonely feelings in Boston.
Interesting as that journey is, in the literary tradition it is a retelling of a provincial’s migration to the big city, where, if all goes well, his talents take him to the pinnacle of fame. Had Wolfe only this well-worn plot to share, readers would likely turn to The Web and the Rock as relevant but not powerful foregrounding autobiographical fiction linked to the better-realized George Webber of You Can’t Go Home Again.