The Doctor and His Wife: Might There Have Been a Kinder, Gentler Wolfe?(Critical Essay‪)‬

Readers of Thomas Wolfe can safely assume that whatever the author writes about his characters, he is more often than not presenting physically and psychologically accurate portraits of real persons. What upset the townspeople of Asheville when they read about themselves, their neighbors, or the Wolfe and Westall families in Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) was not that native son Wolfe had distorted their personalities, but rather that he had laid bare their secrets, their foibles, before the world. Wolfe might tweak a portrait to emphasize someone's darker side, but he seldom made anyone worse than he or she was in reality. An exception is Judge Webster Sondley in O Lost. For Sondley, Wolfe created a new persona, a wicked caricature. The author must have had his reasons for wanting to expose the attorney's hypocrisy, nuttiness, and egocentricity. It is difficult to grasp, however, where he was headed with Hugh and Alice McGuire. Altamont physician Hugh McGuire is a recurring figure in Wolfe's fiction. He is based on Asheville physician Eugene Glenn, an innovative surgeon, beloved town medico, husband, father of four, devout Methodist, and unrepentant alcoholic. In Wolfe's briefest of tales, "No Cure for It," Eugene Gant is almost eight, and his worried mother, fearful that he is growing too fast, seeks a medical opinion.