Novel: Of Time and the River

Overview
Of Time and the River (1935) continues Thomas Wolfe's sprawling, autobiographical chronicle of a young writer, George Webber, as he leaves his mountain hometown and confronts the wider world. The novel expands Wolfe's portrait of artistic ambition and human longing into a panoramic narrative that moves through cities, seas, loves, betrayals, and the relentless passage of years. Its energy comes from a fierce, conversational lyricism that alternates exuberant memory with aching introspection.
Wolfe treats life as an accumulation of impressions and epiphanies, letting episodes unfold in long, breathless sentences that reach for the particular and the universal at once. The novel refuses neat plotness in favor of emotional momentum: scenes arrive like waves, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes pitiless, but always charged with the sense that time reshapes every striving human heart.

Narrative
George Webber departs the small Southern town that shaped his earliest consciousness and immerses himself in the social and intellectual currents of the 1920s and early 1930s. He passes through New York and Europe, meets a succession of mentors, friends, and lovers, and tests his capacity for work, excess, and feeling. Travel and career milestones are less endpoints than stages for introspection and the attempt to translate lived experience into art.
Episodes range from the thrillingly liberating to the devastatingly lonely, and Wolfe lingers over both public triumphs and private losses. The narrative amplifies ordinary moments into quasi-mythic significance, mapping how memory and desire alter the meaning of each event and how the restless pursuit of an authentic voice shapes Webber's life.

Characters
George Webber stands at the center as a porous, searching self: generous, egotistical, curious, often self-destructive, and endlessly observant. His hunger for experience drives him outward into cities and relationships, while his longing for a rooted sense of home and origin pulls him back toward recollection and family memory. That tension, between wanderlust and the need to belong, powers much of his development.
Supporting figures appear as intense, vividly drawn presences rather than static types: friends who mirror and complicate his ambitions, lovers who reveal different facets of desire and disappointment, and older figures who offer both guidance and judgment. The town that birthed Webber functions almost as a character itself, its customs and voices woven through the narrative as a source of identity and ache.

Themes and Style
Time, memory, and the making of art are the novel's central obsessions. Wolfe examines how a life is stitched from unpredictable encounters and how a writer's task is to render that flux into language. Love and loss recur as twin forces that propel and fracture the protagonist, while the social transformations of early twentieth-century America, urbanization, modernity, and cultural restlessness, provide a broad backdrop.
Stylistically, Wolfe is maximalist: long, sinuous sentences, passionate rhetorical surges, and a penchant for sensory detail. He blends local color with sweeping metaphor, frequently breaking into apostrophic addresses that heighten the emotional pitch. That stylistic generosity can overwhelm as well as illuminate, creating moments of astonishing insight alongside passages that test readers' patience.

Reception and Legacy
Critical responses ranged from admiration for Wolfe's raw imaginative power to frustration with his verbosity and narrative looseness. Readers and reviewers praised the novel's emotional truth and lyric force while noting its sprawling structure and repetitive impulses. Over time, Of Time and the River secured its place as a major American modernist achievement, valued for its ambitious scope and its frank, confessional approach to life-writing.
Wolfe's influence appears in the work of later novelists who embraced autobiographical experimentation and the idea of the novel as a vehicle for psychological expansiveness. The book remains compelling for readers who appreciate writing that risks excess in order to capture the complexity of growing, remembering, and attempting to shape a life into art.