My Other Loneliness

Written over an eleven-year period, these letters between Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein chronicle a love affair that was by turns stormy, tender, bitter, and contrite.

When Wolfe met Mrs. Bernstein shortly before his twenty-fifth birthday in 1925, she was forty-four, married, and at the pinnacle of a successful career as a stage and costume designer. Bernstein gave the young writer not only the...