By all means finish reading "Look Homeward, Angel." It is perhaps the most beautifully written and told story I have ever read. It doesn't get really good until you're coming up on the end, hence the title. "O, lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again," the theme. And, yes, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's Scribner's editor, felt like he'd read a novel even near the beginning. Thomas Wolfe was pretty much banned from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, once the book was published (you may already know this), because the residents recognized themselves in the novel even though Wolfe used fictional names. But, he made me love Asheville (Altamont in the novel). It is one of my centering places. I have visited the town and Wolfe's childhood home there, stood in the bedroom where Ben, his brother, died, and read the novel twice. Once you have finished reading that, start on his next novel, "Of Time and the River." I have wound down the mountain from Asheville on a train three times and across Virginia at night. The passages Wolfe wrote are so touching, so poetically beautiful. But, that's as far as I've gotten. There's something so lyrical and stirring about a Southern male's writing. There's nothing like it. I'll finish the journey of that novel someday, before it collects too much dust in my library. I'll stop here; otherwise, this'll look like a novel.
"The Count of Monte Cristo" is one of the best books I've read, Minna.
By all means finish reading "Look Homeward, Angel." It is perhaps the most beautifully written and told story I have ever read. It doesn't get really good until you're coming up on the end, hence the title. "O, lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again," the theme. And, yes, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's Scribner's editor, felt like he'd read a novel even near the beginning. Thomas Wolfe was pretty much banned from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, once the book was published (you may already know this), because the residents recognized themselves in the novel even though Wolfe used fictional names. But, he made me love Asheville (Altamont in the novel). It is one of my centering places. I have visited the town and Wolfe's childhood home there, stood in the bedroom where Ben, his brother, died, and read the novel twice. Once you have finished reading that, start on his next novel, "Of Time and the River." I have wound down the mountain from Asheville on a train three times and across Virginia at night. The passages Wolfe wrote are so touching, so poetically beautiful. But, that's as far as I've gotten. There's something so lyrical and stirring about a Southern male's writing. There's nothing like it. I'll finish the journey of that novel someday, before it collects too much dust in my library. I'll stop here; otherwise, this'll look like a novel.
PS Love this line: “There's something so lyrical and stirring about a Southern male's writing.”