The Lost Boy, Without a Door

The centre of Thomas Wolfe's world (emotional and, in turn, literary) is the house where he lived with his family as a child. His work moves in a spiral around this point, and around what surrounds it, the city of Asheville, which he never left, although he had lived in several countries since he was very young. In this edition, the centre of the world is called The Lost Boy  and No Door.

In The Lost Boy, the action takes place in 1904, at the time of the World's Fair held in Saint Louis. Grover Wolfe, the boy referred to in the title, is only 12 years old, but, according to those who knew him, he was blessed with extraordinary sensitivity and maturity. Written by his younger brother, Thomas Wolfe, the novella tells, in four parts, with four distinct and well-differentiated voices, the search for the "lost boy".

Although it was written before The Lost Boy, William Faulkner considered No Door a story about time and the vagabond its natural continuation. The lost brother also appears here, although the true protagonists of the novella are others: the dead father and the family home; the rough drivers who cross the United States of America at night with the trucks loaded with merchandise; a millionaire bored with his comfortable life; the splendid and unique students of an English university; and a mysterious character who, immutable, observes the world every day through a window.

However, the true protagonist of these extraordinary pages is its narrator, a Thomas Wolfe who, as he himself would confess, poured into them all his enthusiasm, all his confusion, and all his youthful fears (not knowing that he would die shortly afterwards, and still young).