Thomas Wolfe, page 561
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The kind of naked directness with which the young man writing his first book is likely to make use of his material, but as I have said, much of the trouble and misunderstanding may have come from the fact that I have not yet succeeded in being autobiographical enough, instead of the fact that I was, as many people say, too autobiographical. At any rate, as I go on, my tendency I believe is to make use of the materials of living experience with an ever increasing freedom of the inventiveness and the plastic powers of the imagination.
As far as the experience of work itself is concerned, I have found that so far from isolating one from contacts with reality and a living experience with the world around one, it enhances and enriches one’s perceptions enormously. In fact, it seems to me that the core of an artist’s life is his work, and his deepest knowledge, his greatest power, his profoundest social feelings come through the work he does as a great current of electricity pulses and surges through a dynamo. I suppose it is true that a man at twenty is likely to have an egocentric picture of the universe, is concerned with life very largely as it reflects and acts upon his own personality. And I suppose also that this concentration on his own immediate experience and interest is likely to show itself in his earlier work. But so far as my own experience is concerned, I believe that as one grows older, he becomes a great deal more interested in the life around him in terms of itself. His interests, and the adventures and experiences of his own personality, become valuable to him more in terms of their relation to the experience of all mankind. And his social feeling, his whole understanding and sympathy with the lives of people and with the whole human experience, becomes enormously enriched and deepened as a result of this. That, I hope, has begun to happen to me. At any rate, I am working.
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Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe
