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A Western Journal: A Daily Log of the Great Parks Trip, June 20-July 2, 1938
Book by Wolfe
96 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1968
2 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Wolfe
399 books1,141 followersPeople best know American writer Thomas Clayton Wolfe for his autobiographical novels, including
Look Homeward, Angel
(1929) and the posthumously published
You Can't Go Home Again
(1940).
Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels and many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He mixed highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. Wolfe wrote and published books that vividly reflect on American culture and the mores, filtered through his sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. People widely knew him during his own lifetime.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan with Gap Creek; Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Wolfe influenced Ray Bradbury, who included Wolfe as a character in his books.
(from Wikipedia)
Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels and many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He mixed highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. Wolfe wrote and published books that vividly reflect on American culture and the mores, filtered through his sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. People widely knew him during his own lifetime.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan with Gap Creek; Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Wolfe influenced Ray Bradbury, who included Wolfe as a character in his books.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 6, 2018
Late in life, Wolfe strove to become the American bard, to sing the praises of the power, scope, and potential of America and American democracy. It was quite a shift from his earlier darker and more ironic vision and fiction that were centered as much in Europe (particularly Germany) as in the US. This journal, from his 1938 road trip through the American West and written shortly before his death, shows the American bard at work, reveling in the immensity and beauty of the Western landscape and in his motion through it. Though not written as verse, it's shaped as if in stanzas, with streams of impressions cascading in lines that sometimes connect, sometimes not. If anything, it makes one think of Walt Whitman--or at least, the notes and impressions that Whitman might have started with before he wrote his verse. It's a very cool book that races along. Maybe not for everybody, but certainly for anyone interested in Wolfe.
April 26, 2021
(153)
desert land—bald, scrub dotted ridges on each side ascending into lovely timber then to granite tops, and desert land now semi-desert, semi-green—clumped now with sage and dry, but bursting marvelously into greenery when water is let in—and the river (the Sevier) refreshing it. Still semi desert with occasional flings into riper green—the cool dense green of trees
This page taken at random from the 300 notebook leaves that comprise the record of Wolfe’s journey from Oregon, down through California, across Arizona, up through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, thence across the Idaho panhandle and the breadth of Washington to Olympia and Seattle where he took ill with pneumonia that killed him eight weeks later. This book then is the final vision of a man whose graphomania was his art, and its biblical excesses are spiritual delight to read. The man notices everything. His eye lingers on every stone by the road, each bosque, copse, thicket, and every hill, swale, and valley. The western national parks are catalogued, but the best of this book comes from the road—at 60 mph Wolfe noticing ecstasy of American landscape, scrawling madly in a ledgerbook. His mind seems to find two contrary analogues along the way: the riotous greens in Oregon which for him call to mind the unlikely triumph of life over death, and the evacuated time-worn desert of the Mormons who playacted biblical narratives in the 19th Century frontier. Everywhere, every page thick daubed hope for a country possessed of preternatural beauty not yet laid waste.
Perhaps this landscape murdered him at 38 lest he live to see it despoiled.
desert land—bald, scrub dotted ridges on each side ascending into lovely timber then to granite tops, and desert land now semi-desert, semi-green—clumped now with sage and dry, but bursting marvelously into greenery when water is let in—and the river (the Sevier) refreshing it. Still semi desert with occasional flings into riper green—the cool dense green of trees
This page taken at random from the 300 notebook leaves that comprise the record of Wolfe’s journey from Oregon, down through California, across Arizona, up through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, thence across the Idaho panhandle and the breadth of Washington to Olympia and Seattle where he took ill with pneumonia that killed him eight weeks later. This book then is the final vision of a man whose graphomania was his art, and its biblical excesses are spiritual delight to read. The man notices everything. His eye lingers on every stone by the road, each bosque, copse, thicket, and every hill, swale, and valley. The western national parks are catalogued, but the best of this book comes from the road—at 60 mph Wolfe noticing ecstasy of American landscape, scrawling madly in a ledgerbook. His mind seems to find two contrary analogues along the way: the riotous greens in Oregon which for him call to mind the unlikely triumph of life over death, and the evacuated time-worn desert of the Mormons who playacted biblical narratives in the 19th Century frontier. Everywhere, every page thick daubed hope for a country possessed of preternatural beauty not yet laid waste.
Perhaps this landscape murdered him at 38 lest he live to see it despoiled.
March 12, 2014
Haunting.
A journal written by a man full of life and lust for adventure, wallowing in the nautural beauty of the western National Parks, making charming observations of singing waiters and teary teachers--who becomes ill within days after touchingly parting from his companions to die within six months.
A journal written by a man full of life and lust for adventure, wallowing in the nautural beauty of the western National Parks, making charming observations of singing waiters and teary teachers--who becomes ill within days after touchingly parting from his companions to die within six months.
August 5, 2019
Fascinating journal of Wolfe's trip with two traveling companions in 1938 just months before his death at age 37. They bgan at Mt. Hood in Oregon and traveled through 13 national parks in 8 states in 11 days covering over 5,000 miles. It is a cascade of images written on the fly that put me in mind of Gerald Manley Hopkins with the cataloguing of images and the sensuous sound undulating with alliteration, assonance, and consonance with soft vowels and hard consonants rolling around together like two lovers between the sheets. While it is regrettable that Wolfe did not live long enough to shape this into a finished acount, it is marvelous document to have and a living testament to the diversty, beauty, and magnificence of the country in the west.
July 14, 2017
My rating only works if you are a big fan of diaries and historical documents. A Western Journal was the novelist Thomas Wolfe's last writing project, though in truth it is merely a series of scribbled-down notes that he turn during an extended road trip through the western national parks a month before his death. Some of the words and phrases are brilliant and some will leave you scratching your head because this is, indeed, the ultimate rough draft.
June 17, 2020
Meh. I love Wolfe but this did little for me. A few lines and situations here and there and as I'm from the PNW it was nice to read about familiar places but otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.
January 2, 2025
This very short book is just a transcription of Thomas Wolfe's journals from a quick car trip to national parks across the western US. Think "if this is Tuesday, we must be in Yellowstone," in imitation of tourists in Europe who seem to be travelling only to glimpse landmarks and move on.
I've never read any Thomas Wolfe, so I can't compare it to his other writings. I found it sometimes poetic and often repetitive. I wonder if he or his companions mentioned who he was or any premise for his trip - he often mentions having perfunctory discussions with park directors, rangers, or caretakers, studded with nuggets about park history and geography, which seem to bore him. I want to see pictures of the lodges and the food in particular. It was a different era, and very few people could take a trip like that.
Finally, I couldn't help, while reading "A Western Journal," thinking about Jack Kerouac road novels. It is well documented that Kerouac was influenced by Wolfe (he modeled his first published book, The Town and the City, on Wolfe's style, and was quoted declaring that Wolfe was the world's best writer), and I can't escape the feeling that somehow he must have read this. It was published in January 1951, and Kerouac actually wrote the first draft of On the Road in April 1951. There's a rushed, direct, and cryptic quality to the prose of the Journal, and a tendency to listing and documenting actions that I have found in Kerouac.
Regardless, Kerouac was interested in finding and reflecting the zeitgeist of America, and if anything, the Journal also unselfconsiously does that, much as an American tourist gets on the bus in the morning in Paris looking forward to finishing the day in Brussels, while thinking about what they will do in Amsterdam, and so on, and so on, etc
I've never read any Thomas Wolfe, so I can't compare it to his other writings. I found it sometimes poetic and often repetitive. I wonder if he or his companions mentioned who he was or any premise for his trip - he often mentions having perfunctory discussions with park directors, rangers, or caretakers, studded with nuggets about park history and geography, which seem to bore him. I want to see pictures of the lodges and the food in particular. It was a different era, and very few people could take a trip like that.
Finally, I couldn't help, while reading "A Western Journal," thinking about Jack Kerouac road novels. It is well documented that Kerouac was influenced by Wolfe (he modeled his first published book, The Town and the City, on Wolfe's style, and was quoted declaring that Wolfe was the world's best writer), and I can't escape the feeling that somehow he must have read this. It was published in January 1951, and Kerouac actually wrote the first draft of On the Road in April 1951. There's a rushed, direct, and cryptic quality to the prose of the Journal, and a tendency to listing and documenting actions that I have found in Kerouac.
Regardless, Kerouac was interested in finding and reflecting the zeitgeist of America, and if anything, the Journal also unselfconsiously does that, much as an American tourist gets on the bus in the morning in Paris looking forward to finishing the day in Brussels, while thinking about what they will do in Amsterdam, and so on, and so on, etc
February 16, 2025
I just finished The Web And The Rock and will begin You Can’t Go Home Again in a few days, so I thought I would revisit A Western Journal, as I read it a few months ago. Since I mentioned Wolfe’s editor several times in my review of The Web And The Rock, it is appropriate to include my review of A Western Journal here.
This abbreviated work has the distinction of being the last manuscript that Thomas Wolfe produced. "A Western Journal" was Wolfe’s title, but it was, in its final form, the work of his editor, Edward Aswell. It was written from his rough notes in a ledger book that the novelist kept on a thirteen day road trip in a white, 1936 Ford sedan during a circuitous route in the western part of our country.
Wolfe intended for it to be the basis of his next project but died of tuberculosis shortly after completing this whirlwind trip. His travel journal is very different from his novels, but yet his imagination and descriptive analysis of life in its simplicity continue to take center stage.
Thomas Wolfe was a very gifted writer; his unique style makes even the outline of a travel journal interesting reading and worthy of a five-star rating. *****
This abbreviated work has the distinction of being the last manuscript that Thomas Wolfe produced. "A Western Journal" was Wolfe’s title, but it was, in its final form, the work of his editor, Edward Aswell. It was written from his rough notes in a ledger book that the novelist kept on a thirteen day road trip in a white, 1936 Ford sedan during a circuitous route in the western part of our country.
Wolfe intended for it to be the basis of his next project but died of tuberculosis shortly after completing this whirlwind trip. His travel journal is very different from his novels, but yet his imagination and descriptive analysis of life in its simplicity continue to take center stage.
Thomas Wolfe was a very gifted writer; his unique style makes even the outline of a travel journal interesting reading and worthy of a five-star rating. *****
October 27, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews