| * Actual items for sale may vary from the above information and image. |
 |
|
|
 View all Good Items |
|
* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
|
|
|
 |
|
Synopsis
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, Wolfe's first novel, was published on October 18, 1929 only a few days before the great stock market crash. It 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. In his preface, Wolfe wrote: "Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would run over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancor or bitter intention."
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 23.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world."
Industry Reviews
"Here is a novel of the sort one is too seldom priviledged to welcome. It is a book of great drive and vigor, of profound originality, of rich and variant color....The color of the book is not borrowed; it is native and essential. Mr. Wolfe has a very great gift--the ability to find in simple events and in humble, unpromising lives the whole meaning and poetry of human existence....His style is sprawling, fecund, subtly rhythmic and amazingly vital. He twists language masterfully to his own uses, heeding neither the decency of a word nor its licensed existence, so long as he secures his sought for and instantaneous effect."
New York Times Book Review - Margaret Wallace (10/27/1929)
"It was with America he was most deeply concerned and I believe he opened it up as no other writer ever did for the people of his time and for the writers and artists and poets of tomorrow. Surely he had a thing to tell us."
Introduction - Maxwell Perkins (01/01/1947)
"There is such a mammoth appreciation of experience and of living that the intention of the novel cannot be articulated.... If I could create one magic word that would make everyone want to read the book I would write it down and be utterly satisfied."
New York Herald Tribune Book Review - Margery Latimer (11/03/1929)
"[L]ike very true work of the imagination it has deep, strong, sustaining roots in the senses and therefore loves and praises life....The epic of the Gant family is the most powerful piece of fiction from present-day America that I know of."
Hesse
"[I]t is a rich positive grappling with life, a remembrance of things past untinged by the shadow of regret, of one who has found his youthful experiences full of savor. No more sensuous (not to be construed as sensual) novel has been written in the United States."
Chamberlain
"LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, pure in ambition, dressed in the ornaments of his vast reading, rich, almost burdened with a grand style of adjective and metaphor, and homely enough in catching the diction, the pauses, the pretensions and evasions of the strangers and family that explode in the pages. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL is a pastoral of memory, a graveyard of youth and not a recording but a strange magnification shaped by an untamed imagination."
Hardwick
|
|
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
All rights reserved.