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Book Cover for: Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, Thomas Wolfe

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

Thomas Wolfe

The sequel to Thomas Wolfe's remarkable first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River is one of the great classics of American literature. The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer.
The work of an exceptionally expressive writer of fertile imagination and startling emotional intensity, Of Time and the River illuminates universal truths about art and life, city and country, past and present. It is a novel that is majestic and enduring. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, "It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life."
This edition, published in celebration of Wolfe's centennial anniversary, contains a new introduction by Pat Conroy.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Scribner Book Company
  • Publish Date: Sep 8th, 1999
  • Pages: 896
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.40in - 6.50in - 2.00in - 2.70lb
  • EAN: 9780684867854
  • Recommended age: 19-19
  • Categories: ClassicsGeneral

About the Author

Wolfe, Thomas: - Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. He taught English at New York University and traveled extensively in Europe and America. Wolfe created his legacy as a classic American novelist with Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; A Stone, a Leaf, a Door; and From Death to Morning.

Praise for this book

"In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life. In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence--for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that?"--Philip Roth