The Web and the Rock

The Web and the Rock is an American bildungsroman novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1939. Like its sequel, You Can't Go Home Again (and also The Hills Beyond) it was extracted by Edward Aswell from a larger manuscript after Wolfe's death. Description The novel's protagonist is George "Monk" Webber, a novelist from North Carolina who is clearly based on Wolfe himself and is reminiscent of Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Wolfe's earlier novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, also based by Wolfe on himself. Wolfe believed that the book represented an artistic evolution for him, which is why he changed the name of the protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, who was also more mature and aware than Gant. The book, which like all of Wolfe's major works mirrors Wolfe's own life experience, takes Webber from a Southern small-town boyhood to college (with its escape from the "web" of family ties), to New York City where he seeks the meaning of life and attempts to establish himself as a novelist, engages in a stormy affair with the sophisticated married woman Esther Jack (based on Wolfe's real-life affair with Aline Bernstein). Although Esther is very supportive of Monk and even tries to help him get his lengthy novel published, their relations are tempestuous; resenting his dependence on her, he storms off to Europe. During his travels in Europe, he is torn between what he calls the desires of his Mind and his Body and finally becomes conflicted with the inspiration of foreign lands and the recollections of his youth. He dreams of returning to his hometown, but realizes that he can't recapture the past: the book's ending words are the title of his next novel – "you can't go home again." Creation 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.