Thomas Wolfe's Second Novel Jitters

Now that I had written one novel and they, the actual readers and the critics who had read it, were looking for a second, I was up against it. I was not up against it in the way I dreaded, I was up against it cold and hard as one comes up against a wall. I was a writer. I had made the writer's life my life; there was no going back; I had to go on. What could I do? After the first book there had to be a second book. What was the second book to be about? Where would it come from?

Thomas Wolfe in The Golden Age, Richard L. Tobin, editor, 1974 [Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), like so many literary novelists of his era, was a neurotic who took writing too seriously and drove himself crazy.]