Journal Article

Painting America: The Related Obsessions of Thomas Wolfe and Edward Hopper

Bentz, Joseph

2020

Overview

Thomas Wolfe has similar scenes in his novels, when his characters approach life by looking through windows at the lives of others or when they look out their city windows to make sense of the world beyond them. Within a train car, there is both togetherness with people and an expected social distance, which Wolfe and Hopper portray in complex and fascinating ways. The protagonist, George Webber, and his lover, Esther Jack, peer through George's New York City apartment window repeatedly throughout the summer as they contemplate a man behind another window across the street at a warehouse called The Security Distributing Corp. Before him, all that summer of 1929, in the broad window of the warehouse, a man sat at a desk and looked out into the street, in a posture that never changed. Though they watch him day after day, like museum-goers analyzing a work of art, the warehouse man never shows any awareness of them.

• Publisher: Thomas Wolfe Society,Thomas Wolfe Review
• Subject: American fiction / Hopper, Edward / Hopper, Edward (American painter) / Novelists / Novels / Painters / Painting, American / Social aspects / Voyeurism / Wolfe, Thomas / Works