The 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." Wolfe's novella affords a significant glimpse of a Depression era New York inhabited by Wall Street wheelers and dealers and the theatrical and artistic elite. Wolfe describes the Jacks and their social circle with lavish attention to mannerisms, clothing, furnishings, and other trappings of wealth and privilege, and he spreads before readers a table groaning with sumptuous food. The sharply drawn contrast between the decadence of the party-goers and the struggles of the working classes in the streets below reveals Wolfe's gifts as both a writer and a sharp social critic.