![]() With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. Here, for example, is a clip from a section where Eugene Gant wakes up in the morning and gets dressed: But in the nitty-gritty of Wolfe’s words I often stumble and grab the dictionary for support. He wants us to feel life deeply even through mundane details. He wants us to live there, experience moments and settings. Wolfe was, rather, writing to immerse us in a world. Wolfe was not interested in writing a traditional novel with an identifiable plotline, my friend explained. ![]() He sent me a paper he’d done for a conference on how we should approach Wolfe. But I was not picking up any reason to care about Eugene, the Gants, or the town of Altamont where everything takes place.Īfter about 150 pages I sent an email to my friend, asking him what I was missing. I knew this was supposed to be a novel about a boy named Eugene Gant. There is a lot of prose (Wolfe once admitted that his great fault was “too-muchness.”) that is mostly narrative summary. So it seemed like a good time to break out my old copy of Look Homeward, Angel and try again. Scott Berg’s award-winning book about Perkins. The movie (which I have not seen yet) is called Genius, based on A. Now there is a major motion picture out about Wolfe and his editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins. No less a literary light than Harold Bloom considers Wolfe a “mediocre” talent who has no (as in zero, zilch) “literary merit.” What stopped me was the steep decline in his literary reputation over the past fifty years or so. I made some attempts to read Wolfe back in college, but quickly got over it in favor of his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, and one of his heirs, Jack Kerouac.īut I’ve long had it in my mind to give Wolfe another try. ![]() He’s an expert in American Lit, with a specialization in Thomas Wolfe. I have a good friend who’s a college English prof.
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