"The Web and the Rock" is an American bildungsroman novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1939. Like its sequels, 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'The Hills Beyond' it was extracted by Edward Aswell from a larger manuscript after Wolfe's death. It follows the life of George 'Monk' Webber, a novelist from North Carolina. The book, which like all of Wolfe's major works mirrors Wolfe's own life experience, takes Webber from a Southern small-town boyhood to college (with its escape from the "web" of family ties), to New York City where he seeks the meaning of life and attempts to establish himself as a novelist, engages in a stormy affair with the sophisticated married woman Esther Jack (based on Wolfe's real-life affair with a married woman).But he soon tires of the affair...