A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Thomas Wolfe
Who Says “You Can’t Go Home Again”? Book Signing – Burlington, Vermont
Near the end of the posthumously published You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe muses, through the eyes of his literary alter ego, George Webber “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” According to a superb website simply called “How Books Got Their Titles,” Wolfe got the title for his novel while having dinner with a friend. He told her how people of his home town of Asheville were really quite put out by his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, going so far as to make threats on his life (even today those feelings have not died. Rumor has it that the fire a couple years ago in the Thomas Wolfe house was set by unforgiving descendants of slighted Ashevillians). His companion commented: “But don’t you know you can’t go home again?” [...] Read More »
The Advance Copy (and Errata)
Yesterday I couldn’t write about what it felt like to hold the finished book in my hands. The experience was too fresh. Robert Frost said that he always wrote in after thought, after some mulling had taken place and some thoughts had accumulated. That’s how I feel too. But I must say that the spell of the new book was somewhat broken after I leaned the book against something else on the top of my car while I wrestled my son Felix out of the child seat. From where I was on the other side of the car I heard the thud as the book slid off the car and landed on the street. It survived remarkably well (french fold jackets should be required by the government on all books.) A Journey Through Literary America has a promising heft to it. But because of the rounded spine it fits well in the hand. It is a joy to see two years and nine months of work transformed into something so lovely to look at and so portable. I looked randomly at the book: back towards front, here and there. I read two of the entries that I had not read [...] Read More »
Thomas Wolfe: In Memoriam
Again a nod to Today in Literature: on this day, Thomas Wolfe passed away from tuberculosis that had been lurking in his body since he was a boy. He was just shy of 38 years old. The event that occasioned it was an exhausting grand tour of the national parks of the West. Wolfe was a writer for hire on the National Parks project. But no doubt the project appealed to the man who once wrote of his thinly-veiled autobiographical character, George Webber: His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings–between wandering forever, and then the earth again–and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer. In his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel, Maxwell Perkins quoted a passage from War and Peace that Wolfe loved: “Prince Andrei looked up at the stars and sighed; everything was so different from what he thought it was going to be.” This was a theme for the young Thomas Wolfe, who came to earth trailing clouds of glory, who retained them in his mind but [...] Read More »
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