Beyond the Lost Generation: The Death of Egotism in You Can't Go Home Again (Critical Essay‪)‬

In a 1938 letter to Margaret Roberts, Thomas Wolfe meditated upon his growing social consciousness and the concomitant changes it brought to his view of himself as a man and artist. "Like you," he wrote his former teacher, "I have become in the last few years tremendously involved with the state of the world--as my consciousness of life has enlarged, my consciousness of self has dwindled ..." (Letters 738). This turn outward finds expression in his posthumous work "The Hills Beyond" (1941), devoted to the Joyner clan of western "Old Catawba" (North Carolina). It finds perhaps its fullest and most pointed expression in You Can't Go Home Again (1940), in which the autobiographical protagonist, George Webber, overcomes his desire for personal fame in order to commit himself more fully to an accurate rendering of the multifaceted aspects of Western civilization and most explicitly of America. Mirroring Wolfe's break with Maxwell Perkins and Scribner's, book 7, the final section of You Can't Go Home Again, is comprised of a lengthy letter from George Webber to his editor, Foxhall Edwards, in which George announces his decision to sever his relationship with his mentor and the publisher he represents. He explains his action by providing an overview of his life and his maturation as an artist, an account that alludes to many of the major dramatic episodes of The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again. In his articulation of the still-evolving life philosophy at which he has arrived, George finds it necessary, if not to repudiate the aesthetic that produced his earlier work, then at least to subsume it as part of a much broader and more mature worldview, one that moves explicitly beyond the values of the Lost Generation, with whom writers of that movement and subsequent scholars have identified Wolfe.