Wolfe, unlike O'Neill, came from the South. Unlike O'Neill, he had lived at home most of his life. Unlike O'Neill, he had come to no resolution of the course his life and art would take.

Wolfe arrived in Boston after four years at a state college in North Carolina. His first, and most enduring, impression of Harvard was symbolized by Widener Library, Maxwell Geismar writes: "As a young man he had been driven wild by the sight of the Harvard Library--by the fact that the volumes were appearing on the shelves faster than he could read them, and the fact that simultaneously, while he was reading, outside, on the bare New England streets, were passing thousands of faces he had not seen, people he had not talked with, lives he had not known."

His immediate reaction to the Harvard community was dislike. In his classmates especially, with the ex- ception of the tortured, in-grown, dead and beautiful Starwick, he found the stoniness, the apathy, the lifeless wit which characterized the Harvard literati.

The class's "lack of warmth," wrote Wolfe in Of Time and the River, "the absence of inner radial heat which, not being fundamental in the structure of their lives, had never been wanted, filled [me] with a horror and impotent fury...."

For O'Neill, a man somewhat of the world, a spectacle like this could be ignored. For Wolfe, burdened with a vision of genius, it was intolerable.

Wolfe was facing "one of the oldest--what for the creative mind must be one of the most painful problems of the spirit--the search for a standard of taste. He had, at seventeen, as a sophomore, triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert Browning.

Classmates a Menagerie

His classmates were a typical Harvard menagerie, a group which was sorry for many things and many people, including Shaw. There was an elegant young dawdler who spent most of his time in Paris and just couldn't read Sir James Barrie; and the epigram-maker with the splintered promise of a satiric wisdom; and the young man of little backbone and less originality who betrayed--to his ridicule--a stammering eagerness.

But Wolfe decided, under the guidance of Baker, that playwriting was his goal. As he wrote himself:

"It seemed to him that there was only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this work, he had better die, since any other life than the life of a playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.

"He learned all the jargon of the art-playwriting cult, read all the books, saw all the shows, talked all the talk, and even became a kind of gigantic eavesdropper upon life, prowling about the streets with his ears constantly straining to hear all the words and phrases of the passing crowd, as if he might hear something that would be rare and priceless, in a play for Professor [Baker's] celebrated course."

"Women were forever calling for 'Gene...

"He was hard-boiled and whimsical. He was brutal and tender, so I was told. From shop girl to 'sassiety queen,' they all seemed to develop certain tendencies in his presence. What may have resulted, deponent sayeth not. About some things 'Gene was Spinx-like. All I can report are the phenomena."  --Weaver

And, finally, Wolfe's grand indictment of the class members: "False, trivial, glib, dishonest, empty, without substance, lacking faith--is it any wonder that among Professor [Baker's] young men few birds sang?"

Wolfe wrote hime in 1921 that a commercial producer had approached him to write a play. "Well, I will take one more chance and give him what he wants, in spite of the fact that Professor Baker will throw up his hands and say that I have 'prostituted my art' and so on, when I see him.