Word: social
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...half years later, after the publication of his second novel, Of Time and the River, Wolfe traveled to Paris. There he met Sylvia Beach, owner of the noted English bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She thought Wolfe "indubitably a young man of genius" but "perhaps very unsatisfactory as a social being...
...irony in her flash appraisal runs through David Herbert Donald's lengthy biography of Wolfe. Where, if indeed they exist, are the proper boundaries between genius and social being? Must a person's success in one category be contingent upon his success in the other...
Wolfe today is regarded as neither literary genius nor social success. Both his writing and his behavior are seen to have suffered from gargantuan excess. Donald, however, reveals a man whose literary genius draws its very strength from social excess, from the ability to experience and emote on a grand scale. He reveals a man who, according to one of his lovers, was "intolerable and wonderful and talked like an angel and was a real son-of-a-bitch...
...product, a victim, of the rural Southern environment that bred such beliefs? Or are we to judge and condemn his standards by our own? Donald succeeds in bridging a gap between these two extreme forms of interpretation. His biography of this most autobiographical of authors never excuses Wolfe's social immaturity, but it fights to prevent Wolfe himself from fading into literary exile...
Wolfe was not incapable of making social statements; his fear of fascism spreading to America spurred the following passage...