75th Anniversary of Wolfe's Birth This Week; Collection of Author's Papers Now at Harvard

It might surprise novelist Thomas Wolfe, born 75 years ago this month, that his papers are currently in Harvard's Houghton Library. Wolfe, the author of "Look Homeward Angel" and "You Can't Go Home Again" felt that his years at Harvard and his attempts to become a playwright were a mistake.

The extensive collection of Wolfe's papers housed in Houghton, the gift of New Orleans businessman William B. Wisdom, contains a diverse assortment of items, including 1000 post-cards Wolfe collected of European art and historical sites and a number of his works inscribed to Aline Bernstein, his lover and the model for the character Esther who appears in several of his novels.

Interest in the Wolfe papers at Houghton is high, with about 15 people using the papers in the last year, Rodney G. Dennis III, curator of manuscripts in the Harvard College Library, said Wednesday. This is about the same number of people who used the e.e.cummings papers, a popular collection, he said.

Glib and Easy

In 1937, when the Wisdom collection was started, Thomas Wolfe had been away from Harvard for 15 years. Wolfe came to Harvard as a graduate student in English in 1920, mainly to join Professor George Pierce Baker's course, English 47, a highly selective playwriting workshop. At first, Wolfe worshipped Baker and his course, although he had nothing but contempt for the other students in the class. As he describes them in "Of Time and the River," his novel about his Harvard years, they were pretentious and untalented. He thought they were snobs, and they regarded his eccentricities as freakish.

During his time at Harvard, Wolfe tried to read every book in Widener Library. He wrote in "Of Time and the River" that he "simply wanted to know about everything on earth." He would cruise the stacks of the library at night, trying to read the pages of books in less than twenty seconds each.

After three years and the critical failure of several of his plays, Wolfe left Harvard, convinced that his efforts to be a playwright were as "fantastically wrong as anything could be."

Wolfe had become disillusioned with Baker by this time, although the professor had made Wolfe his protege. Wolfe later described Baker, as a shallow man who used nothing but "glib and easy jargon.