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Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River

Wolfe’s second novel, a sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, follows on with the life of Eugene Gant. The original manuscript was several thousand pages long and called The October Fair. Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins spent a lot of time editing it down (part of it became The Web and the Rock.) As with Look Homeward, Angel, Eugene Gant’s life matches Wolfe’s own as we see him going to Harvard, teaching in New York and travelling to Europe. As with the previous book, you either like Wolfe’s style – the mass of images and symbols, the tumult and the violence – or you don’t.

Publishing history

First published 1935 by C. Scribner’s Sons