For the last eight years of his life, Thomas Wolfe worked periodically on a series of chapters that were part of a huge work-in-progress. The work was based loosely on the early life of New York stage and costume designer Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was engaged in a tempestuous love affair for eleven years. In her introduction, Suzanne Stutman points out that publication of this novel should finally lay to rest the myth that Wolfe could write only about himself.

Although some sections of this work were heavily edited and published after Wolfe's death, The Good Child's River, as Wolfe wrote it, was not published until 1991 and is now available in paperback for the first time.