Review
“Here is a novel which burns its way into your mind and your memory. If you read it, you will not forget it.” ― Newsday
“Wolfe manages to turn the minutiae of Trotsky’s assassination into a powerfully written thriller.” -- Mark Perryman ― Philosophy Football
“Wolfe is a remarkable and essential lost American voice, and Great Prince is one of his finest books, drawing on his vast verbal and intellectual powers, the keenness of his storytelling gift, and the rich ferocity of his polemical vision. What he brings to the historical novel is the opposite of a bogus ‘objectivity’―instead, Wolfe rightly sees the twentieth century in dialectical terms―an eruption of a series of arguments, subjectivities, viewpoints, and the inevitable tragedy of their irreconcilability.” -- Jonathan Lethem
“The belief in Trotsky’s life as an epic of modern politics is the reason the University of Chicago Press has recently reprinted a little-known American book from 1959, The Great Prince Died, by Bernard Wolfe. University presses rarely get behind novels but the Wolfe book richly deserves this chance at a new audience. Like a good historical novelist, Wolfe inserted his own intuitions in the spaces between the known facts. The result is so well crafted that readers can follow the plot with excitement, even though they know at the start how it ends.” -- Robert Fulford ― National Post
“Wolfe’s prose is like that itch of sand unwanted by the oyster. Slowly, as the story unfolds, a pearl begins to form. You read with growing fascination. How does one write a novel about political intrigue and assassination, a didactic novel with a thesis no less, with an ending well known before it even begins, and keep it flowing? Read The Great Prince Died. It works. . . . The novel is really a disguised treatise, but it is so damn finely constructed that it makes for a hell of a read. Wolfe, as ultimate peeper, enters Trotsky’s sandbagged fortress in Mexico and gives us a physical and psychic tour of the land/mindscape.” -- Larry Grobel ― Los Angeles Free Press
“Powerfully told.” -- Robert Kirsch ― Los Angeles Times, The Book Report
“This is a significant novel—significant because of the light it sheds on history, significant because it is an action-packed human drama that is breathtaking.” -- Mildred Zaiman ― Hartford Courant
“The Great Prince Died succeeds admirably in holding and tightening the interest of readers to whom the outcome is known in advance. . . . More than this, Wolfe has written a political novel, and one of the most striking ever produced by an American author. . . . Wolfe has written such convincing fiction that it may be difficult to remember that history may have happened in some other way.” -- Maurice Dolbier ― New York Herald Tribune
“Illuminating for its insight into the moment when a great struggle for human liberation became a tyranny that still threatens the world. . . . No one who reads The Great Prince Died . . . can fail to be gripped by a tale well told. Its message is one the free world will ignore at its peril.” -- Selden Rodman ― New York Times
"Wolfe . . . has produced one of the major political novels of our time." -- Richard McLaughlin ― Boston Globe
About the Author
Bernard Wolfe (1915-85) was an American writer whose interests stretched from cybernetics to politics. He was the author of many books, including Limbo and The Late Risers, and coauthor of Mezz Mezzrow’s classic memoir, Really the Blues.
