Party at Jack's

In the summer of 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the North Carolina mountains revising a piece about a party and subsequent fire at the Park Avenue penthouse apartment of the fictional Esther and Frederick Jack. He wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, ''I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I''ve ever written.'' Abridged and edited versions of the story were published twi...