The Web and the Rock

In May 1938, Wolfe gave his manuscript to his new editor, Edward Aswell. According to John Halberstadt, "It was not a finished product in any sense. It was a collection of materials that [Wolfe's previous editor], Maxwell Perkins had cut from earlier novels, previously published sketches or even short novels, chapters in variant versions, fragments, new writing — only the 'enormous skeleton' of a novel... perhaps one and a quarter million words, some five thousand pages, over two hundred chapters." Wolfe then left New York City and died later that year.^[5]

Thus, The Web and the Rock was very heavily edited by Aswell. According to Halberstadt, Wolfe's later books (including The Web and the Rock) were "not really written by Wolfe in the usual sense but were predominantly the work of... Aswell." Aswell removed the entire first section (covering Webber's ancestors) and later published this as a separate work, The Hills Beyond. Aswell then crafted a new opening, cut fifty chapters, and recast other chapters by combining sections of various chapters and writing connective material himself.^[5] Unused parts of the manuscript would later be published as You Can't Go Home Again.

Wolfe's biographer David Herbert Donald complained that Aswell's work was butchery and went well beyond the proper remit of an editor: "From standardizing the names and the tenses of Wolfe's manuscript, Aswell moved on to modifying the rhythm of his prose, to altering his characterizations, and to cutting and shaping his chapters. Greatly exceeding the professional responsibility of an editor, Aswell took impermissible liberties with Wolfe's manuscript, and his interference seriously eroded the integrity of Wolfe's text. Far from deserving commendation, Aswell's editorial interference was, both from the standpoint of literature and of ethics, unacceptable"^[6]

Harold Bloom, however, praised Aswell's work: "Wolfe's Byronic blank verse (very blank) masking as prose, left pretty much unaltered by Maxwell Perkins, is less tiresomely obtrusive after being worked over by Aswell."^[6]

Leo Gurko, in his book Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego, wrote of the book "Read, as it should be, as an intensely articulated mural, first of the provincial and then, climatically, of the urban landscape, it not only does not suffer by comparison with its famous predecessor, but is not to be compared [with anything else]".^[7] Kirkus Reviews described The Web and the Rock as a further example of Wolfe's "utter inability to select and discard, his obsession with himself and his actions and motives and emotional turmoils" coupled with his "queer streak of genius", resulting in a "turgid outpouring of his own emotional life, put into fictional form" which demonstrates "the same weaknesses, even more sharply emphasized, and the same sense of power that made his earlier work memorable".^[2]

• The Web and the Rock at Faded Page (Canada)