Look Homeward Angel (Scribner Classics) - Hardcover

Wolfe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684842211 ISBN 13: 9780684842219

Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD, 1997

Synopsis

The classic first novel from one of America's greatest men of letters
"I don't know yet what I am capable of doing," wrote Thomas Wolfe at the age of twenty-three, "but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it." Six years later, with the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe gave the world proof of his genius, and he would continue to do so throughout his tumultuous life.
Look Homeward, Angel is the coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, whose restlessness and yearning to experience life to the fullest take him from his rural home in North Carolina to Harvard. Through his rich, ornate prose and meticulous attention to detail, Wolfe evokes the peculiarities of small-town life and the pain and upheaval of leaving home. Heavily autobiographical, Look Homeward, Angel is Wolfe's most turbulent and passionate work, and a brilliant novel of lasting impact.

About this title

Review:

""Look Homeward, Angel" is one of the most important novels of my life. . . . It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience." -- Elizabeth Kostova, author of "The Historian"

In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life. In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence for an epicAmerican existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that? --Philip Roth"

"Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished." -- Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons

"Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life. . . . It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience." -- Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian

"Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page." -- William Gay, author of The Long Home

"As so many other American boys had before and have since, I discovered a version of myself in Look Homeward, Angel, and I became intoxicated with the elevated, poetic prose." -- Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek

"In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life. In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence--for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that?"--Philip Roth

About the Author:

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900, Thomas Wolfe was educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard. He became an instructor in English at New York University in 1924, serving intermittently until 1930. He traveled extensively thereafter in Europe and in America. He was one of the great prose stylists in American literature, whose legacy has had tremendous influence on numerous Southern writers, including William Styron, James Dickey, and Walker Percy. Wolfe died in Baltimore in 1938.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684842211
• ISBN 13: 9780684842219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 528