Look Homeward A Life Of Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow of prose was shaped into novels by his editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins.

In this definitive and compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Herbert Donald dismantles that myth and demonstrates that Wolfe was a boldly aware experimental artist who, like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, deliberately pushed at the boundaries of the modern novel. Donald takes a new measure of this complex, tormented man as he reveals Wolfe's difficult childhood, when he was buffeted between an alcoholic father and a resentful mother; his "magical" years at the University of North Carolina, where his writing talent first flourished; his rise to literary fame after repeated rejection; and the full story of Wolfe's passionate affair with Aline Bernstein, including their intimate letters.

Supersedes all previous Wolfe biographies in illuminating detail, in empathy for its complex unhappy subject, in sympathy for what he wanted to do, and what he did, as a writer, and in its own literary distinction...A work of great subtlety and sophistication. Washington Post Book World

Easily the best biography of an American novelist. -- Washington Post Book World

An eloquently told story and an extraordinary achievement -- Gore Vidal

1988 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

David Herbert Donald was Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of American Civilization at Harvard University.

• Preface
• I. A Secret Life
• II. The Magical Campus
• III. By God, I Have Genius
• IV. I Shall Conquer the World
• V. Must Spin Out My Entrails
• VI. Like Some Blind Thing upon the Floor of the Sea
• VII. A Miracle of Good Luck
• VIII. Penance More
• IX. A Miserable, Monstrous Mis-begotten Life
• X. The Famous American Novelist
• XI. Almost Every Kind of Worry
• XII. Unmistakable and Most Grievous Severance
• XIII. A New World Is Before Me Now
• Afterword: The Posthumous Novels of Thomas Wolfe
• Acknowledgments
• Sources, Abbreviations, and Notes
• Index