Look Homeward

Thomas Wolfe was a writer who famously spewed out words upon the page in endless streams, attempting to achieve The Great American Novel by putting his own life on paper. He wrote four massive novels, combining passages of over-the-top bad writing with some of the most beautiful prose ever committed to paper. His editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell became almost as famous as Wolfe for their Herculean efforts in getting his titanic manuscripts into publishable form. Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), and his two posthumously published works, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) are classics of American literature, though today entirely unfashionable. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for this appreciative biography of the genius of purple prose.