''The Good Child's River'' is a novel by

Thomas Wolfe Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly origin ...

. A formerly lost novel, it was first published in 1991, 53 years after Wolfe's death. The book was found, edited, and produced by Suzanne Stutman, a Wolfe scholar who also edited the 2003 book ''My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein''. It has been described as a novel, but also as a "novel-length fragment", a "hastily... lashed together... welter of vignettes" making for "an unfinished novel", and "not so much a novel as it is a rich collection of reminiscences and tableaux" Wolfe wrote it around 1930, as part of a huge epic series to be called "The October Fair". ''The Good Child's River'' was meant to be a part of Wolfe's 1935 novel ''

Of Time and the River ''Of Time and the River'' (subtitled ''A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth'') is a 1935 novel by American author Thomas Wolfe. It is a fictionalized autobiography, using the name Eugene Gant for Wolfe's, detailing the protagonist's early and ...

'', but most of it was never typed from the three handwritten ledgers which Stutman found in the William B. Wisdom Thomas Wolfe Collection of Harvard's

Houghton Library Houghton Library, on the south side of Harvard Yard adjacent to Widener Library, is Harvard University's primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. It is part of the Harvard College Library, the library system of Harvard's Faculty of Art ...

manuscript collection. What had been typed had been included in the posthumously edited and published 1939 novel, ''

The Web and the Rock ''The Web and the Rock'' is an American bildungsroman novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1939. Like its sequel, '' You Can't Go Home Again'' (and also ''The Hills Beyond'') it was extracted by Edward Aswell from a larger manuscript af ...

'' as well as in ''From Death to Morning'' and ''

''. Unlike Wolfe's major novels, ''The Good Child's River'' doesn't include either Eugene Gant or George Webber, Wolfe's fictional counterparts, but instead focuses on Webber's lover, Esther Jack (based on

Aline Bernstein Aline Bernstein (December 22, 1880 – September 7, 1955) was an American set designer and costume designer. She and Irene Lewisohn founded the Museum of Costume Art. Bernstein was the lover, patron, and muse of novelist Thomas Wolfe. Early life ...

). Bernstein made many notes about her life for Wolfe, who fashioned the material into ''The Good Child's River'' (Bernstein also used some of the same material in her autobiography, ''An Actor's Daughter'').

Reviews

Frank Levering described the novel as "an exotic, unique experience for the reader... Esther Jack is a compelling character – a girl and young woman with an open mind and a clear-eyed passion for life as it comes. Through her eyes, aunts, cousins, schoolmates, her mother and friends of the family come alive vividly – a parade of flawed humanity on the streets of old New York." ''

Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of B ...

'' wrote that Wolfe's "storytelling genius, vital and chaotic, emerges" in the book and that "Reading these lyrical, effusive pages is to take an invigorating plunge in the swarming sea of Wolfe's imagination". Donald Newlove wrote that "''The Good Child's River'' is not minor Wolfe. Readers who come fresh to it, never before having read Wolfe, may well be stunned by his power, and may start questioning the skinny little sentences and squeaks of feeling in today's writers. The rest of us will be replenished and exhilarated. Nobody writes for full orchestra any more." ''

Kirkus Reviews ''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fic ...

'' said that "The novel is a meditation, in Wolfe's boldest style, on time as a dark, rich river" and that although "there are clinkers about the Jews, things Esther would never say or think, and some of his women are sticks... all is forgiven in the sheer magic of Wolfe unbound", the whole resulting in "An often stunningly disciplined first draft – by a genius."

Reviews

References

Further reading