Boston Athenæum

December 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. This lecture is sponsored by the William Orville Thomson Endowment. Despite his protests to the contrary, American novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose writings are well represented in the Athenæum’s collections, is remembered as a representative of the “Lost Generation,” a generation of artists who renounced the outmoded verities of their forebears as useless in the Modern age. With the advent of the Great Depression, Wolfe confronted widespread suffering, especially in New York City, where he was living at the time, and this newfound concern for the plight of others made him reconsider not only the solipsism that had threatened his earlier fiction but the Modernist aesthetic that had informed it. In his posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), Wolfe grew away from the bildungsroman to write proletarian fiction on a global scale. After exposing the unjust distribution of wealth in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he exposes the class system of England and the rise of Naz