The Starwick Episodes

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One of the most enduring characters in Thomas Wolfe's fiction is Francis Starwick, the midwestern aesthete who befriends Eugene Gant at Harvard in Wolfe's second autobiographical novel, Of Time and the River. In the process of organizing Wolfe's massive manuscript for publication, however, editor Maxwell Perkins deleted some of the analyses of Starwick's behavior and several of the episodes involving Eugene and Starwick. The result was that the relationship between the two young men was not as fully developed as Wolfe had originally planned. Richard S. Kennedy discovered these excised passages among the Wolfe papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library. In The Starwick Episodes he has arranged them sequentially and indicated their position in the original manuscript. In one of them Starwick introduces Eugene to Joyce's Ulysses, and in another he takes him to view the paintings in Boston's Museum of Fine arts. Additional scenes find the two exploring the lower depths of Paris until at length their true sexual natures are revealed in a visit to a Parsian brothel. Kennedy's research also uncovered the story of the life of Kenneth Raisbeck, the young man whom Wolfe used as the starting point for his fictional creation of Starwick. In his Introduction, Kennedy describes Raisbeck's career, both its brilliant promise and its tragic end, and his similarity to the character in the novel.