Here, then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand pages and a million words–put down just as they were written, in fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence–here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of a man’s soul and heart–the image of his infuriate desire–caught hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul’s agony.

Thomas Wolfe