Study Guide to Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Thomas Wolfe, skilled writer of impressionistic prose. Titles in this study guide include Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time and the River.As a collection of mid 20th century novels, Wolfe's work displayed his quest for authority, fellowship, literary success, and identity. Moreover, Wolfe used his imagination to heighten and adapt every detail from his memories. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Wolfe's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS WOLFE

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born October 3, 1900, in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of seven surviving children of William Oliver and Julia Elizabeth (Westall) Wolfe. His father, a towering stonecutter of dynamic speech and action, provided an image of male force and restlessness which was to endure in the mind of Wolfe throughout his life. Although his father was a brooder who drank and upset the family by his outbursts of wrath, he also had deep resources of love for nature, for the work of his hand, and for his children; and his children, in turn, worshipped him. Mrs. Wolfe, on the other hand, although not lacking in maternal feeling, was an ambiguous figure to her youngest son. In various ways, she tried to dominate him to keep him as her baby by having him sleep in her bed and by letting his hair grow long even after he was going to school. As the same time, her dissatisfaction with her lot as wife of an unambitious drunkard and her desire for security led her into independent financial endeavors which alienated her from her husband and, to some degree, from her children, whom she ceased to attempt to understand. In 1904, she made a break with her husband, taking all of the children except the eldest daughter to St. Louis to run a boarding house for visitors to the World’s Fair. When one of the children died, Mrs. Wolfe returned to her husband. But in 1906, she bought a house in Asheville and ran it as a boarding house called the Old Kentucky Home. She took all of the children except Mabel, the father’s favorite, to live with her. Tom spent his youth traveling between the houses of the two parents.

PRIVATE SCHOOL

At 11, Tom left the public school to become a pupil in the private North State School when it was founded by J. M. Roberts, the principal of his grammar school. Roberts’ wife, Margaret, who taught in the school, became a spiritual mother to Tom. The first person to recognize his genius, she encouraged him, at the age of 14, to begin to write, to give form in language to the yearnings that would carry him beyond the mountains that surrounded Asheville.

COLLEGE

Asheville had always represented a confinement of the spirit to Wolfe and, in adolescence, when his extreme height and awkwardness intensified his self-consciousness, he longed to escape the prison of his provincial environment. When he was preparing to attend college, he set his sights on the University of Virginia or Princeton. But his father, determined that he should prepare himself for a career in law and politics, insisted he go to the state school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In September, 1916, gawky and green, a ready target for the clever jibes and pranks of upperclassmen he arrived on campus. After a dismal freshman year he fell in love with a summer boarder at the Old Kentucky Home-a girl already engaged to be married. To add to his unhappiness, his brother Ben was rejected by the draft because of bad lungs, and the condition of his father, who was suffering from cancer, worsened markedly.

The next year was a relatively happy one. Tom joined numerous clubs and began to write for student publications. He was beginning to earn a reputation as a campus humorist.

The spring of 1918 was marred by the death of Edmund Burdick, an Asheville boy who was Tom’s roommate. And that fall-after a hellish summer in Norfolk working briefly on defense jobs and almost starving-Tom endured the tragic death of his beloved brother Ben.

In his junior year Tom’s interests turned toward the drama. He enrolled in a course for playwrights in which students were required to write plays using the folk materials of the Carolina Mountains. During his senior year when the question of his future began to loom, those around him spoke vaguely of journalism. But his own inclination was to go to Harvard Graduate School to become a student of Professor George Pierce Baker in the 47 Workshop for playwrights. His mother finally agreed in the late summer of 1920 to finance him for a year, and he gained admission to Harvard.

GRADUATE SCHOOL

In the North, Wolfe sought the authority and security for which he had always longed. He paid frequent visits to his uncle Henry Westall, a former minister, now a real-estate conveyancer in Boston; perhaps he hoped to discover in Westall’s reminiscences about his mother’s family a sense of his own identity. He worshipped Professor Baker, in whose course he enrolled. And he submitted to the influence of Kenneth Raisbeck, the aesthetic and glitteringly polished young man who was Professor Baker’s assistant.

Tom stayed at Harvard for three years, concentrating on courses in literature and drama and hungrily devouring thousands of books on a multitude of subjects. In the summer of 1923, he submitted a play to the Theatre Guild for possible performance on Broadway, but the play was returned with suggestions for revision. Much as Wolfe tried to cut and organize the play according to Theatre Guild specifications, the more sprawling it became. His gift was not for condensation but for fullness of elaboration. Despondently, he took a job teaching at the Washington Square College of New York University.

NEW YORK CITY

The following years consisted of a series of frustrated explorations and quests. When not writing plays or teaching, he would prowl the streets by night, absorbing the life and mystery of the city. And when his perplexity at the hard face of the city became too great, he would escape weekends on the trains that run northward along the Hudson River (in his mind developing the symbolic associations of the train, the river, and time), often stopping at Rhinebeck to stay at the estate of Olin Dows, a friend from Harvard, a painter whose work reflected the overprotectedness of his life as a child of wealth. In the fall of 1924 he went to Europe, meeting Kenneth Raisbeck and two Boston girls in Paris, and falling in love with the younger. When she refused him, he became involved in a jealous feud with Raisbeck which shortly terminated their friendship. Traveling alone, he resumed his writing. He returned in September, 1925 to meet a teaching commitment. As the ship docked in New York City, he met a fellow passenger, Aline Bernstein - the Esther of his novels. Although she was 44, she was a woman of charm and beauty (and a great cook, confirming Wolfe’s theory that culinary ability was a measure of sensuality), and he soon fell in love with her.

After another year of teaching at N. Y. U. and several unsuccessful attempts to sell his plays, Wolfe visited London in the summer of 1926 and there began jotting down incidents from his youth as the basis for a novel. He returned to New York and accepted an offer from Mrs. Bernstein to support him until he finished his book.

In March, 1928, he began submitting his novel to publishers. In the meantime, his relationship with Mrs. Bernstein had been deteriorating because of jealous arguments. In the summer, he tried to break with her by making a tour of Europe on his own. But he could not refrain from writing affectionate letters, which resulted in a reconciliation that extended their affair for one more year. It was during this trip to Europe that Wolfe had a fight with several men and a woman in a Munich beer hall that resulted in his hospitalization.

PUBLICATION

While in Europe Wolfe had received a letter from Maxwell Perkins, a Scribner’s editor, expressing interest in his novel. Upon his return he worked closely with Perkins, cutting and reorganizing, until the novel was ready for publication in October, 1929. In keeping with his tendency to seek authority outside of himself, Wolfe, more than any other major American author, gave responsibility for the final condition of his novel to his editor.

The reaction to Look Homeward, Angel was generally favorable-although the citizens of Asheville, North Carolina, were ready to lynch Wolfe for the cruel accuracy of his portrayal.

In 1930 Wolfe went to Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship and began to write a catalogue of the memories of his life. His London meeting with Sinclair Lewis, besides providing the basis for an episode in You Can’t Go Home Again, made him feel a part of the literary community. Upon his return, working in a basement apartment in south Brooklyn, with his only close friend his editor, he produced several short stories and a large sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, which he thought of as one novel, but which later developed into three. When Perkins received the massive manuscript, he immediately cut it into two portions, the first one ending with Eugene’s meeting with Esther (based on Aline Bernstein) on shipboard, the second dealing with the subsequent romance, and concentrated his attention on the first of these. After a year and a half of editing, cutting, disputing, the new novel, to be entitled Of Time and the River, was ready for publication.

But the friendship of Wolfe and Perkins had been undermined. Wolfe had begun to despise himself for needing the authority of Perkins, and eventually he transferred his spite to Perkins himself. Furthermore, Perkins was relatively conservative, resisting the young author’s attempts to insert social criticism in his novels at a time when Wolfe was developing a social conscience and felt a need to express protest. Too, Wolfe was becoming uneasy about his financial relationship with Scribner’s and, no doubt, he began to sense that his publisher was forcing him to conform to the needs of the trade rather than encouraging his development as an individual artist-one who did not write novels with unified plots or of the proper size. More than anything else, Wolfe probably felt that Perkins and Scribner’s were trying to cut him down.

To avoid the crisis of publication, Wolfe went to Europe in the spring of 1935. In May, buoyed up by favorable reviews and critical acclaim, he made a triumphal entry into Berlin, there to spend the German royalties on the translation of his first novel. It was characteristic of Wolfe that he make up his mind on the basis of personal experience, and, in Germany, swept off his feet by the adulation of the reading public, he was conscious only of a glorious elation and was slow to recognize the dangers of Hitlerism. Not till he returned to Germany in the summer of 1936 did he become aware of the falseness and brutality of the Nazis.

THE BREAK WITH SCRIBNER’S

After his return to America in the fall of 1936, Wolfe’s conflict with Scribner’s reached a crisis. Intent on proving that he could write a successful novel independently of Perkins, he began to negotiate with several publishers and, after considerable confusion, accepted an offer from Harper for his next book.

In May, 1938, Wolfe left his manuscript with Edward Aswell, a Harper editor, and, after stopping at Purdue University to give a talk, made a trip through the West. On July 4, as a celebration, he took a steamship cruise from Seattle, Washington, to Vancouver, British Columbia. On board, he met a man who became sick with a chill, and he gave the man a swig from a bottle of whiskey before he took a drink himself. He contracted a cold which led to pneumonia-which reactivated an old tubercular condition. He died of tuberculosis of the brain on September 15, 1938, a month before his thirty eighth birthday. His manuscript, put into final form by Aswell, was published as two separate novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940).

THE NOVELS

The pattern of Wolfe’s life emerges as a quest for authority, fellowship, literary success, and identity. This quest is depicted in four novels consisting of 700-1000 pages each and in several short pieces dealing with the same or related materials. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, covers the first 20 years in the life of Eugene Gant-a fictional personality extremely close to Wolfe’s own, although Eugene, it should be mentioned, is more the genius, less the ordinary boy with a sense of humor and an interest in games and sports than was Tom Wolfe. The second, Of Time and the River, is a sequel to the first, depicting Eugene’s wanderings during the next four years. The Web and the Rock, his third novel, introduces a new character, George Webber: it parallels the earlier works in its treatment of the life of a boy growing up, but then goes on to narrate a major love affair which begins when he is 24. The fourth novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, continues the experiences of George Webber from age 28 to 36.

TECHNIQUE

Although Wolfe is an autobiographical writer utilizing a remarkable memory to recapture the details of the past, his art is far from reportage. His imagination colors and heightens every detail that it fixes upon. Fitzgerald, in a letter, took him to task for his failure to select-but he does, in one sense, select: he does choose and adapt the experiences recalled from the deep well of memory. He does not “select” in the way that writers intent on the well-made novel do. He does not unify plot, cha...