Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfewas a writer who famously spewed out words upon the page in endless streams, attempting to achieve The Great American Novel by putting his own life on paper. He wrote four massive novels, combining passages of over-the-top bad writing with some of the most beautiful prose ever committed to paper. His editorsMaxwell Perkinsand Edward Aswell became almost as famous as Wolfe for their Herculean efforts in getting his titanic manuscripts into publishable form.Look Homeward, Angel(1929),Of Time and the River(1935), and his two posthumously published works, The Web and the Rock (1939) andYou Can't Go Home Again(1940) are classics of American literature, though today entirely unfashionable. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald won the 1988Pulitzer Prizefor this appreciative biography of the genius of purple prose.