In the first two years, Wolfe divided his time between George Pierce Baker's "47 Workshop," and classwork for a master's degree. He took Shakespeare from Kittredge, Romantic Poetry from Lowes, and completed the required curriculum with nearly all A's. Generally he tried to read the complete works of every author mentioned in his classes, and his term papers ran to fantastic lengths, sometimes 80 or 90 typewritten pages.

By far the most significant part of Wolfe's work at Harvard, however, was the plays he wrote for the 47 Workshop. His relationship with Professor Baker was quite close, and the eventual split with Baker when he left Harvard was the source of great anguish.

In the winter of 1920 Wolfe wrote his first play at Harvard, a one-act drama called The Mountains, which was produced for a special workshop audience the following fall. The Mountains was a raw, unpolished production, little resembling the glib drawing-room fare produced by other members of the workshop. It was a story of the Carolina mountain people, dirty and sordid, yet filled with the mystical and romantic eulogization of the "land" which became a trademark of Wolfe's later work. Criticism of the play was highly unfavorable, and Wolfe became despondent: "I will never forget the almost inconceivable anguish and despair...." In his letters he lashed out again at people who talked softly of "creative ottists," and who considered clinical analysis of a character's psychology more important than what Baker called "simple human values."

Wolfe later lengthened The Mountains into a three-act play. He revised by completely re-writing; in a letter to Baker he mentions that he wrote the three-act version of The Mountains without once looking at the original script.

Belief in Ineguality

The following autumn, Wolfe started Mannerhouse, a drama about the decay of old South. He wrote to a friend: "I think my play The House will `pack a punch,' for it is founded on a sincere belief in the essential inequality of things and people, in a sincere belief in men and masters, rather than in men and men, in the sincere belief in some form of human slavery--yes, I mean this...." Wolfe did not finish this play at Harvard. He finished it years later, just before he abandoned drama and started Look Homeward, Angel.

In June of the second year Wolfe received his master's degree. While waiting in Cambridge for Commencement, he was called home to the death-bed of his father. He returned to Harvard the following September convinced of the dramatic possibilities of the entire Wolfe family. Fragments have been found among his papers which suggest that Wolfe experimented with his family as characters for drama immediately following his father's death, and at this time conceived in some embryonic form, the general outline of Look Homeward, Angel.

Happiest Year

Wolfe's third year at Harvard was his happiest and most productive. Since his father's death had freed him from financial difficulties, and has formal classwork was finished, he could devote his entire mind and energy to the 47 Workshop. In the first two weeks after his return to Cambridge, Wolfe submitted the first acts of six projected plays to Professor Baker. At Baker's request he concentrated on one of these plays, which he had tentatively titled Niggertown. During the course of the winter he developed it into an unconventional ten scene form, and renamed it Welcome to Our City as a concession to the remaining vestiges of Cambridge abolutionism. It was performed in Agassiz Theater on May 12 and 13, 1923, and is generally thought to have been the finest produced by the 47 Workshop.

Welcome to Our City was a sprawling four-hour dramatization of the cross-section of a Southern city caught in the frenzy of the predepression boom years. "Greed, greed, greed--deliberate, crafty, motivated--masking under the guise of civic associations for municipal betterment.... The standards of national greatness are Henry Ford, who made automobiles cheap enough for us all, and money, money, money!!"

DeVoto

In the note Wolfe sent to Professor Baker with the manuscript of Welcome to Our City, he described his ideas of "literary photography," the quality in his later writing which was to make critics throw up their hands in disgust, and prompt Bernard DeVoto to growl about the "proper business of fiction." Wolfe wrote to Baker: "I have written this play with thirty-odd named characters because it required it, not because I didn't know how to save paint. Some day I'm going to write a play with fifty, eighty, a hundred people--a whole town, a whole race, a whole epoch--for my soul's ease and comfort."

The production of Welcome to Our City was fairly successful. In the late spring of 1923 Wolfe was elated, and confident of commercial success. Baker had submitted the play to the Theater Guild, and Wolfe considered himself a buding dramatist: "I am a slave to the thing; my mind is filled with it night and day. I find I have become an evesdropper, I listen to every conversation I hear, I memorize every word I hear people say, in the way they say it. I find myself studying every move, every gesture, every expression, trying to see what it means dramatically."

And so Wolfe decided that Harvard had done all it could for him. While waiting for the Theater Guild's decision on his play, Wolfe traveled to Asheville and then to New York City. His finances were running low and he hesitated to turn again to his mother for help.

Success was a long time in coming. The Guild rejected Welcome to Our City, and Wolfe remained steadfast in his refusal to trim it to a practical length. For six years he lived as a vagabond, teaching sporadically at N.Y.U., and roaming over the face of inter-war Europe. At times he was exultant, but often hopeless and despondent. From Brussels he wrote: "At 23, hundreds of people thought I'd do something. Now, no one does--not even myself. I really don't care very much...." Finally in 1929 Look Homeward Angel was published, and Thomas Wolfe came into his own.

Thus six years separated Wolfe's work at Harvard and his emergence as a major writer. It is difficult to estimate the extent of the influence of the Harvard years on his later work; that there is a significant influence however is undeniable. The ideas found first in the Harvard plays and letters of the period, occur again and again in the great autobiographical novels. Though the eventual failure of Welcome to Our City produced a temporary disenchantment with the University and Professor Baker, Wolfe later acknowledged his debt to both. In the first draft of Of Time and the River he wrote: "Harvard--the one place he had found where utter freedom had been given him to read think and say what he liked.... Few places have meant more.