The Good Child's River is a novel by Thomas Wolfe. 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 1983 book My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein. It has been described as a novel,[1] but also as a "novel-length fragment",[2] a "hastily... lashed together... welter of vignettes" making for "an unfinished novel",[3] and "not so much a novel as it is a rich collection of reminiscences and tableaux"[4]
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, 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 manuscript collection. What had been typed had been included in the posthumously edited and published 1939 novel, The Web and the Rock[2][4] as well as in From Death to Morning and Of Time and the River.[5]
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). 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).[2]
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