"the Dark was Hived with Flesh and Mystery" (1): Thomas Wolfe, The American Adam, And the Polemical Persona of Race (Richard S. Kennedy Student Essay Prize, 2006‪)‬

In his 1929 review of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Jonathan Daniels remarks that, aside from the portrayal of the Gant family, Wolfe presents "innumerable minor characters, prostitutes, white and black; loose women, Negroes, and dope-fiends, drunken doctors, tuberculars, newsboys and teachers" (3). Daniels's placement of Wolfe's African American characters alongside prostitutes and dope-fiends appears a curious choice unless one has read Look Homeward, Angel and understands that the novel's young hero often perceives black characters as possessing all the exotic lure and intrinsic evil of society's most glaring reprobates. The description of these characters as "minor" is a fitting one in that Dick Prosser of "The Child by Tiger" (1937) is the only fully developed African American character in all of Wolfe's fiction. The absence of African American characters is strange for a number of reasons, particularly because much of Wolfe's fiction is set in the decades following the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow South. Also, toward the end of his life, he found himself grappling with the ideological demands of the southern Agrarians, and he vacillated between his love for the literary North and his rooted dedication to his southern heritage. Because of his emotional and physical proximity to these political and artistic developments, Wolfe would certainly have been aware of the tensions to which they gave rise. However, unlike many of his southern contemporaries, Wolfe, in his fiction, pays little attention to problems of race and even less to problems of racial injustice. Instead, the overwhelming concern of Wolfe's work, as C. Hugh Holman contends, is "the desire to define in fiction the American character and to typify the American experience" (190). From this popular vantage point in the consideration of Wolfe's fiction, it is fitting to connect his attempts to encapsulate the whole of the "American experience" with R. W. B. Lewis's critical construct of the American Adam.