Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (Dodo Press) - Softcover

Wolfe, Thomas

3.92

14,813 ratings by Goodreads

9781409948230: Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (Dodo Press)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1409948234 ISBN 13: 9781409948230

Publisher: Dodo Press, 2008

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Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938) was an important American novelist of the 20th century. He wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works, and novel fragments. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodical, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written during the Great Depression, depict the variety and diversity of American culture. He received his Masters in playwriting at Harvard University. Unable to sell any of his plays, Wolfe found his writing style was more suited to fiction than to the stage. He took a temporary job teaching at New York University, but left after a year for Europe to continue writing. Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is the edited version of Wolfe's original novel O Lost. After his death, two further novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were published posthumously. His other works include: Of Time and the River (1935), The Story of a Novel (1936) and The Face of a Nation (1939).

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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:

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. He taught English at New York University and traveled extensively in Europe and America. Wolfe created his legacy as a classic American novelist with Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; A Stone, a Leaf, a Door; and From Death to Morning.

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