Look Homeward Angel: Summer Reading

“Loneliness is and always has been the central 

and inevitable experience of every man.”

 

WOLFE THE DREAMER

"In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, 

in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, 

and we are strange and beautiful asleep; 

for we are dying the darkness and we know no death."
 

Michael Deas portrait here

from 1930 Vogue on Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL:
this appears to be less a book that a torrent of impassioned prose telling everything about the life of a boy growing into young manhood, his family-including a patient, hard-working, avaricious mother, a drunken father, and a yellow brother-his school days, and his first love affair, which ends in heartbreak. All through the book there is a hungry appreciation of the beauty of the world and fierce detestation of its injustice, misery ad squalor. Here is a passionately earnest view of the universe. The writer seems to have flung it casually into the form of a novel.

WOLFE THE POLITICO

"A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."

by 1930 standards at Vogue it wasn't there yet. How time changes things- Faulkner said Wolfe was his generation's best writer. The format Wolfe used would be adopted by Jack Kerouac, poetry, prose, stream of consciousness- A modern novel,  Vogue was not quite ready for Wolfe. 

WOLFE THE PROPHET

"We are now in the Me Decade - 

seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history."

 

As to the ME DECADE, In this he was off- rather than DECADE, he should have written CENTURY.

But then, He was a Modern Man.
Best read today.

You will not be disappointed.

alternate post title: More good things about North Carolina: Thomas Wolfe

READ this book review from the NYTIMES Paper Cuts Blog here by Steve Coates

the thomas wolfe society here

about TW here at the UNC Collection

the TW web site here