He never failed, however, to return to regional mores. The poor child's had another of his heart attacks. The doctor said it was a mighty close call. Parodies of young adult fiction and one of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney poems also got zapped. In all, nearly 150 passages were excised.
Original manuscripts hold a strange fascination for scholars and lovers of literature.
This is a dicey undertaking, however, because it tinkers with the very notion of literature. Though Wolfe continues to be a popular American writer, his academic stock is not high. He's not easy to teach. His works are too long, amorphous and chock-full of literary references. At the same time, much of his fiction, some professors say, lacks enough Faulkneresque ambiguity to be literarily intriguing.