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This essay describing a 1927 meeting with Thomas Wolfe was first published in Japan in the January 1974 issue of English Literature World. The author, Shiho Sakanishi (1896-1976), was born in Tokyo. She came to the United States in 1922, earning a bachelor's degree from Norton University and a master's from the University of Michigan. She became an assistant professor at Michigan in 1929. Sakanishi returned to Japan in the 1940s where she was a social critic based on American pragmatism and humanism. This translated and edited version of her reminiscence is published with the permission of Yuko Sakanishi. Endnotes have been provided by the editors.
In my long life, I've met several men who were called genius but I did not find them much different from ordinary people. Although he was very shy, Albert Einstein, who formulated the theory of relativity, was a kind, middle-aged man, readily speaking to children and young people. Norbert Wiener, who established the science of cybernetics, was what is called a child prodigy. He entered Harvard at the age of fourteen and took a doctorate at eighteen. But when I met him in his forties, he was a prominent figure in the fashionable world of Boston, talking to the ladies with a cocktail glass in his hand.
Unlike those geniuses, Thomas Wolfe, who was born in and came out of the literarily barren South, impressed me as a genius from the start. To be frank, he reminded me of an old saying: "Genius is only one remove from insanity." I felt that the actual object appeared before me.
I met him in the fall of 1927. At that time, he was a lecturer at New York University, teaching English. Wolfe started as a dramatist. The Theatre Guild was interested in his plays, but they were not highly regarded. In 1925, on his way back from London to New York, he first met Mrs. Aline Bernstein, who happened to be aboard the same ship. She was one of the leading scenic designers in the United States and had already heard of Wolfe. Bernstein, who was a friend of Eugene O'Neill's and who deplored the relative lack of excellent playwrights in America, found the young and passionate Wolfe promising. As a...