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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Thomas Wolfe: Collected Works," readers are invited to explore the profound literary legacy of one of America's most celebrated writers. This comprehensive anthology showcases Wolfe's innovative narrative techniques, rich characterizations, and poetic prose that often grapples with themes of identity, belonging, and the tumult of the human experience. His works, deeply rooted in the Southern Gothic tradition, reflect the author's personal history while also engaging with broader socio-cultural issues of early 20th-century America. Wolfe's distinctive stream-of-consciousness style and his ability to fuse autobiography with fiction position his writing within the modernist movement, marking him as a pivotal figure in American literature. Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina, faced myriad personal and social challenges that ignited his passionate narrative voice. An influential figure of the Lost Generation, Wolfe was deeply affected by his tumultuous experiences during his youth, a theme reflected throughout his writings. His keen observations, paired with a profound sense of place and memory, drive the evocative nature of his prose and reflect the evolving American psyche. This collection is an invaluable resource for both longtime fans and those new to Wolfe's work. Readers seeking to understand the complexities of human emotion and the intricacies of American life will find in this anthology not only a masterful compilation of Wolfe's best works but also an invitation to immerse themselves in the literary brilliance of a storied and transformative author. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Thomas Wolfe: Collected Works
Table of Contents
Introduction
A restless soul wanders through America’s rooms of memory, seeking a home large enough to hold time. This collection of Thomas Wolfe’s greatest works presents an author determined to transform life’s ordinary passages into epic experience. Across these pages, the intimate and the panoramic continually trade places: a boardinghouse stair becomes a continent, a city street expands into a nation’s heartbeat. Wolfe writes with a yearning that is both personal and civic, inviting readers to feel the pressure of time, the pull of origins, and the promise of becoming. To enter his work is to step into a living atlas of feeling.
Thomas Wolfe’s reputation as a classic rests on scale, lyric intensity, and unembarrassed ambition. At a moment when American prose was learning new forms of restraint, he insisted that language could still carry the hurricane of experience. His novels made architecture out of memory and transformed the autobiographical impulse into a democratic vista, large enough to hold towns, rail lines, and whole generations. That resolve helped redefine the American novel’s scope, placing Wolfe among the indispensable voices of the interwar period and making his work a touchstone for writers seeking amplitude without surrendering intimacy.
His impact can be traced in the rhapsodic autobiographical currents of Jack Kerouac, in Ray Bradbury’s exuberant evocations of youth, and in the Southern lyric tradition carried forward by writers such as William Styron and Pat Conroy. Wolfe demonstrated that confession could be symphonic, that a single life might refract a nation’s restlessness. Editors and novelists alike studied the example of his collaboration with Maxwell Perkins, which showed how editorial discipline could shape raw plenitude without extinguishing fire. The result is a legacy that continues to guide writers who aim for bigness of vision and musicality of line.
Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) wrote the works represented here during the late 1920s and 1930s, years that saw American letters negotiating modernity, migration, and the shocks of economic upheaval. His early books were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons under the editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins; near the end of his life he moved to Harper & Brothers, where Edward Aswell would later organize material he left behind. Collectively, these writings chart a young man’s departure from a Southern hometown, his encounter with great cities and institutions, and his struggle to make art worthy of the magnitude he felt in everyday life.
Readers will meet families pulled by love and ambition, rooms crowded with memory, and landscapes that seem to breathe. The sequence moves from provincial thresholds to cosmopolitan avenues, staging the contest between home’s gravitational force and the forward motion of desire. At its core lies a portrait of the artist as a citizen, testing whether private longing can be fashioned into public meaning. Wolfe’s people listen to trains, chase seasons across river and ridge, and learn how the city both enlarges and estranges the heart. The result is a map of arrival, loss, and renewed pursuit.
Wolfe’s purpose was nothing less than total statement. He sought to assemble the scattered hours of childhood and youth, the flares of love and the throb of streets, into a composition that would do justice to their wholeness. He believed the past is not dead material but an active climate surrounding the present, and he wrote to reconcile inheritance with possibility. His intention was to dignify the everyday with large music, to prove that an individual life, carefully observed and fearlessly rendered, could mirror the American experiment—its roads and rooms, its hungers and its consolations.
The first thing many readers notice is the swing and surge of the sentences. Wolfe’s paragraphs gather like weather fronts, full of catalogs, sudden metaphors, and crescendos that recast a streetlamp or a doorway as revelation. Yet the work is not merely ornamental. It is anchored in a sure feel for seasons, trades, trains, and the grain of neighborhoods. This union of sensuous excess and documentary precision gives his pages their voltage. Underneath the amplitude lies rigorous patterning—shifts of voice, motifs that recur like refrains, and an architecture, honed with editors, that guides emotion into form.
The historical backdrop matters. Wolfe wrote in the aftermath of world war and amid the Great Depression, as Americans moved from farms and small towns into industrial corridors and sprawling cities. The book’s trains, tenements, and lecture halls belong to a nation revising itself at speed. From a Southern upbringing to northern skylines, the settings register regional difference and national convergence. While many contemporaries cultivated irony or parable, Wolfe pursued a radical sincerity, aiming to fold the chorus of American life into personal narrative. Reading him is to hear an era learning a new music for its changes.
From the start, the reception combined astonishment with debate. Reviewers marveled at the fervor and reach, even as some questioned the extravagance of the method. The public responded with uncommon enthusiasm, and Wolfe quickly became one of the most discussed American novelists of his day. Behind the scenes, a foundational editorial story unfolded: manuscripts of formidable size were refined in collaboration with Maxwell Perkins, and later, unfinished material was shepherded to print after Wolfe’s untimely death in 1938. That publishing history has become part of the legend, a case study in how vision and craft meet.
Encountered together, these works reveal a web of recurring images and concerns. Windows and doorways frame choices; stations and platforms expose the theater of departure; kitchen tables store the sediment of family life. Rivers and avenues carry the same current of time, while hills and rooftops offer vantage from which to measure a life’s ascent and doubt. Names of places accumulate like a private litany, and minor characters blossom briefly, reminding us that the world teems beyond any single plot. The collection’s continuity is musical rather than linear, a sequence of returns, variations, and enlargements.
Readers might profit by matching pace to breath rather than to stopwatch. Wolfe rewards a slow openness to cadence, an ear for echo and reprise. Allow the pages to build their pressure, and track how images migrate from one scene to another. Notice how civic spaces—depots, libraries, parks—become sites where private fates cross. The work’s largesse is not a detour but the method itself, an argument that abundance better suits a spirited democracy than parsimony. Read for the thrill of recognition and for the solace of proportion, as private history finds resonance in the larger chord.
Ultimately, the abiding themes are home and exile, time’s pressure and memory’s rescue, the brave gamble of making a self within a heaving nation. What endures is the magnitude of sympathy, the willingness to notice and to sing. In an age of acceleration and distraction, Wolfe’s insistence on plenitude and connectedness feels newly clarifying. He shows how the local can open onto the limitless, how personal inventory can become civic hymn. That is why these greatest works remain vital: they offer readers a capacious, ardent way to see, and to keep searching, without losing the thread of belonging.
Synopsis (Selection)
This collection gathers Thomas Wolfe's major novels, stories, and a key essay, presenting a broad panorama of American life and the making of an artist. Organized along the arc of his career, it begins with an intimate portrait of family and youth, expands into the restless search for voice and belonging, and culminates in sweeping, metropolitan and transatlantic vistas. Across the volume, recurring concerns include memory, the pull of home, the pressure of time, and the ambition to shape experience into art. The sequence allows readers to trace how a single consciousness widens into a national canvas while remaining anchored in personal origins.
The opening novel, Look Homeward, Angel, follows Eugene Gant from childhood through adolescence in the mountain town of Altamont. A boardinghouse, a stonecutter's shop, and the lively streets frame his awakening intellect and turbulent family life. Schooling, early friendships, and first encounters with love sharpen his sense of difference and possibility. Tensions at home, ambitions stirred by books, and the allure of distant places press on him. Wolfe details the rhythms of a Southern town while showing the growing span of a mind that wants more than its immediate boundaries. The narrative builds toward independence without disclosing decisive outcomes.
Of Time and the River continues Eugene's journey into wider worlds. He studies in northern cities, explores Europe, and confronts the demands of craft and discipline as he seeks a writer's voice. New mentors, crowded streets, and the machinery of modern life test the exuberance of youth. Family bonds persist at a distance, and memories contend with new experience. The novel layers travel, work, and observation to portray how an individual is reshaped by movement and effort. Time's current, both sustaining and eroding, forms the book's central current, guiding the protagonist from raw promise toward a more exacting vocation.
A selection of short stories and sketches condenses Wolfe's preoccupations into concentrated scenes. Urban sojourns, rail journeys, and brief meetings illuminate the mystery of strangers and the weight of remembered places. Characters navigate nights in new cities and mornings in familiar towns, discovering that the sense of home can shift without warning. Death, celebration, and chance encounters recur, framed by a language attentive to atmosphere and motion. These pieces extend the novels' concerns while offering alternate vantage points, from quick portraits to reflective monologues, showing how the same themes of identity and return can be refracted through smaller, self-contained forms.
The Story of a Novel serves as Wolfe's account of how the early books were made. He describes assembling vast materials, the rigors of cutting and shaping, and the practical collaboration that brought order to abundance. The essay traces stages of composition, the role of memory in creating scenes, and the effort to find proportion without losing vitality. It offers conclusions about the necessity of patience, the value of guidance, and the intention behind the sprawling canvases. By placing process alongside product, the volume clarifies how the search for form paralleled the narrative's inner quests, grounding inspiration in methodical labor.
The Web and the Rock introduces George Webber, a new protagonist whose life in New York intensifies the themes of love, art, and belonging. His relationships, including an affair that challenges his ideals, unfold against theaters, restaurants, and crowded avenues. Success comes edged with doubt as he measures his private hopes against the city's vastness. Journeys south and abroad widen the scope, raising questions about the individual's place in a network of history and desire. The novel balances intimacy and spectacle, using the web to suggest ties that bind and the rock to evoke the need for something enduring amid flux.
You Can't Go Home Again follows George Webber as a published writer facing the consequences of his work. Responses from his hometown and the larger world complicate his ideas of loyalty and truth. He observes Depression era transformations in America and travels abroad, where political tensions and cultural shocks sharpen his perceptions. Encounters with readers, friends, and strangers deepen his understanding of what home can mean when places and people change. The narrative builds on prior questions of identity and time, asking how one writes honestly about origins while accepting that return, in any simple sense, may be impossible.
The collection concludes with later stories and fragments that return to Carolina landscapes and family lineages while looking outward to broader histories. Multi generational portraits and regional myths supply context for individual striving, and reflective pieces consider travel, memory, and the passing of eras. These pages preserve the cadence of voices and the textures of places, suggesting a widening archive of experience even as the span of life narrows. The selection underscores how Wolfe's material could expand or contract, from saga to sketch, and how his imagination kept circling the entwined themes of inheritance, change, and the American scene.
Taken together, these works trace an arc from the close quarters of a household to a continental, and then international, field of vision. The central message is the shaping power of time and memory on a self that seeks authenticity amid movement. Without settling answers, Wolfe's pages follow the work of making meaning from abundance, honoring origins while pressing beyond them. The volume's sequence showcases growth in subject and method, offering key events and conclusions without closing their questions. As a unified reading experience, it presents the making of an artist alongside a vivid record of a country in transformation.
Historical Context
Thomas Wolfe’s major works unfold between roughly 1900 and 1938, moving from the upland South of Asheville, North Carolina, to the roaring, teeming streets of New York City and the uneasy capitals of interwar Europe. His fiction maps an America in transition: railroads and then highways knit distant places together; small towns stretch toward modernity; and urban centers explode with immigration, commerce, and spectacle. The time frame encompasses the closing of the Gilded Age’s social hierarchies, World War I mobilization, Prohibition, the 1920s boom, the 1929 crash, and the New Deal’s vast public works. Wolfe situates individual longing inside these shifting geographies and calendars.
Place functions as historical evidence in Wolfe’s world. Asheville—thinly veiled as Altamont—was a resort and banking hub ringed by the Blue Ridge, its boardinghouses and main streets reflecting early twentieth‑century Southern stratification. New York provides the counterpoint: the theater district, commuter subways, and immigrant neighborhoods make up a modern metropolis. Beyond the Atlantic, Wolfe’s Germany, visited in the 1920s and mid‑1930s, slides from postwar fragility to authoritarian rule. His settings capture the anxiety and energy of the era, tracking how local economies, municipal politics, and national priorities rise and fall across neighborhoods, train depots, and crowded hotel lobbies.
The 1920s real estate and banking boom transformed Asheville into a showcase of mountain urbanity. Civic leaders and developers, buoyed by tourism and new roads, erected monumental structures such as the Battery Park Hotel (rebuilt in 1924), the Asheville City Building (1928), and the Buncombe County Courthouse (1928). Developers including E. W. Grove, who financed the Grove Park Inn (1913) and Grove Arcade (begun 1926), marketed the city as a healthful refuge. Credit was inexpensive, speculation was rampant, and banks extended loans on optimistic projections. Although the catastrophic 1916 floods had signaled regional vulnerability, boosters pressed ahead, gambling that growth would outpace risk.
The speculative bubble burst after the October 1929 stock market crash. Asheville’s interlocking banks and public authorities were saddled with extraordinary bonded debt—about 38 to 40 million dollars by 1930, roughly 1,000 dollars per resident, the highest per capita municipal debt in the nation. Unlike many cities, Asheville refused bankruptcy and pledged to repay its obligations in full, a process that extended until 1976. Businesses shuttered, hotels emptied, and unemployment spiked. Wolfe mirrors this collapse in his portrayals of booster rhetoric curdling into recrimination, of boarded‑up storefronts, and of families grappling with lost savings, exposing the civic costs of speculative civic pride.
Nationally, the Great Depression (1929–1939) saw U.S. unemployment peak near 25 percent in 1933; real GDP contracted by almost 30 percent from 1929 to 1933; and thousands of banks failed before federal reforms took hold. Breadlines, foreclosures, and internal migration reshaped daily life. In New York, relief offices and makeshift camps emerged; in the South, cash‑poor counties tightened belts while tax bases eroded. Wolfe’s characters, moving between Asheville and New York, encounter shuttered theaters, desperate tenants, and the diminished horizons of ambitious youth. His portraits of disillusionment, itinerant searching, and renewed empathy are anchored in this economic catastrophe’s granular effects on streets, jobs, and households.
The legal and social regime of Jim Crow defined public life in the South from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. After Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned segregation, North Carolina’s 1900 suffrage amendment imposed literacy tests and poll taxes that disenfranchised most Black citizens. Segregated schools, streetcars, and hospitals, along with racially biased policing and sporadic lynching, enforced a rigid caste order. While Wolfe centers white Southern families, his settings acknowledge the color line’s omnipresence: segregated neighborhoods, service work confined by custom, and the uneasy proximity of Black labor to white prosperity puncture the myth of a harmonious small town, revealing structural inequality.
World War I (1914–1918) recast American society after U.S. entry on April 6, 1917. The Selective Service drafted nearly 2.8 million men; training camps sprang up, including Camp Greene near Charlotte. Asheville hosted U.S. Army General Hospital No. 19 at Oteen (established 1918) for soldiers with tuberculosis and other ailments, placing wartime medicine and federal authority in the city’s backyard. Nationally, wartime production and migration accelerated urban growth. Wolfe’s young protagonists come of age as parades, casualty lists, and returning veterans alter civic rhythms. The sense of vast forces redirecting private lives—trains leaving, letters arriving—inflects his depictions of ambition, loss, and departure.
The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million worldwide and approximately 675,000 in the United States. North Carolina suffered heavily, with multiple waves overwhelming hospitals; Asheville and nearby Oteen were strained by military and civilian cases. Schools and theaters closed; public gatherings were curtailed. The suddenness of illness and the anonymity of mass death unsettled communities already stretched by war. Wolfe’s writing absorbs this historical mood: funerals, bedside vigils, and streets made eerie by closures recur as atmospheric markers. His attention to breath, fever, and the fragility of the body reads against this epidemiological backdrop, where ordinary life could vanish overnight.
Prohibition, instituted by the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified 1919) and the Volstead Act, took effect in January 1920 and remained until repeal by the Twenty‑First Amendment on December 5, 1933. In the Southern Appalachians, illicit distilling and bootlegging flourished, while urban speakeasies and hotel bars developed coded etiquettes. Federal raids and local corruption made alcohol a flashpoint of class and regional identity. Wolfe’s scenes of clandestine drinking, festive hotels, and moral posturing register this legal regime’s hypocrisies. The mingling of piety with evasion—and of entrepreneurial risk with social transgression—animates his portraits of boardinghouses, night trains, and backstage gatherings where desire outruns statute.
New York’s explosive urbanization between 1900 and 1930—population swelling past 6.9 million by 1930, subway expansions, and Times Square’s consolidation as an entertainment hub—created a magnet for artists and strivers. The Shubert organization dominated commercial theaters, while the Theatre Guild and independent houses advanced ambitious productions. Set designer Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), Wolfe’s partner from 1925 into the early 1930s, embodied the professionalization of backstage craft. Wolfe’s depictions of rehearsal rooms, boarding hotels off Broadway, and late‑night streets reflect this milieu’s economics and codes, revealing how the city’s scale both enables reinvention and exacts loneliness, exhaustion, and compromise from its aspirants.
Federal immigration restriction reshaped New York’s neighborhoods. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson‑Reed Act of 1924 capped arrivals by national origins, using a 2 percent quota based on the 1890 census and severely limiting immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe while barring most Asian immigrants. Ellis Island’s role waned after 1924 as consular controls intensified. Despite curtailed inflows, multiethnic districts—Lower East Side, Little Italy, Yorkville—remained densely textured. In Wolfe’s New York chapters, voices, foods, and storefronts index this plural city. His protagonists encounter cosmopolitan crowds, grasping that America’s promise is negotiated daily across accents, tenements, and shop signs.
Southern industrialization generated fierce labor conflict. The Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina (April–September 1929), led by the National Textile Workers Union, escalated after Police Chief O. F. Aderholt was killed on June 7; organizer Ella May Wiggins was murdered on September 14. Trials in Charlotte drew national attention, and the 1934 General Textile Strike mobilized some 400,000 workers across the South and Northeast. Mill villages, company scrip, and blacklists defined worker life. Wolfe, a North Carolinian observing class tensions, threads mill‑town hardship and employer paternalism into his social landscapes, dramatizing the gulf between civic boosterism and the precarious lives of wage earners.
The New Deal reconfigured public life after 1933. Agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933) and Works Progress Administration (1935) built roads, parks, and public buildings; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stabilized banks under the 1933 Banking Act; and the Social Security Act (1935) established old‑age benefits. In Western North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Parkway was authorized in 1933 and construction began in 1935, ushering federal crews into mountain counties. Wolfe’s later work records relief lines, new roads carved into hillsides, and the presence of surveyors and foremen, registering the state’s muscular return as both caretaker and disciplinarian in the wake of market failure.
Environmental calamity compounded economic misery in the Dust Bowl. Severe drought and soil erosion across the Southern Plains peaked between 1934 and 1936, with Black Sunday on April 14, 1935, sending dust clouds thousands of feet high across Oklahoma and Texas. Some 2.5 million people left the Plains in the 1930s, many streaming along Route 66 toward California. Though not a Plains chronicler, Wolfe’s cross‑country journeys fed passages of parched county seats, trains crawling over brown expanses, and displaced families in station houses. His moral geography links ecological mismanagement to human dislocation, contrasting exhausted landscapes with the regenerative, if uneasy, promise of movement.
The rise of Nazism altered Wolfe’s European lens. Adolf Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933; the Reichstag Fire and Enabling Act consolidated dictatorial powers; the Nuremberg Laws (September 15, 1935) stripped Jews of citizenship. Wolfe visited Germany in 1936 and observed tightening controls, surveillance, and anti‑Semitic humiliation. His essay I Have a Thing to Tell You (1937) publicly condemned Nazi persecution, prompting German authorities to ban his books. In his posthumously published fiction, German episodes stage the seductions of nationalist spectacle against individual conscience, tracing how ordinary sociability—cafés, pensions, train compartments—contracts under fear, betrayal, and the calculated theater of power.
Wolfe’s work critiques the period’s civic illusions by revealing the costs of boosterism, speculation, and narrow respectability politics. Asheville’s boomtown rhetoric dissolves into boarded windows and lifelong municipal debt; New York’s glamour is shadowed by exploitative tenancies and precarious work. He indicts class complacency by detailing the stress points of a boardinghouse economy, the servility demanded by hotels, and the exhaustion of stagehands and clerks. The social order is shown to be contingent, upheld by credit, gossip, and gatekeepers. Economic freedom appears constricted by birth, accent, and address, exposing the gap between democratic promise and stratified, crisis‑prone reality.
Politically, the books expose how law and custom produce injustice. Jim Crow’s daily humiliations, Prohibition’s selective enforcement, and anti‑labor policing in mill towns illustrate state power arrayed against the vulnerable. Wolfe’s Germany episodes warn against authoritarian spectacle and ethnonationalism, aligning his American scenes with a defense of pluralism and dissent. His depictions of relief lines, federal crews, and new roads query the terms of solidarity after market failure, pushing readers to weigh communal obligations against individual ambition. By mapping private longings across segregated streets, shuttered banks, and censored cafés, the work registers a sustained critique of exclusion, conformity, and fear.
Author Biography
Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist of the early twentieth century, renowned for sprawling, autobiographical fiction that sought to capture the breadth of American life. Writing in a rhapsodic, lyrical style, he aimed for an epic portrait of memory, family, and the restless drive for identity. His work emerged alongside modernist innovation yet remained deeply romantic in spirit, placing him between traditions. During a brief but intense career, he produced ambitious books that stirred controversy and admiration in equal measure. Though he died young, his novels—especially Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River—secured a lasting place in American literary history.
Wolfe grew up in the American South and pursued higher education at the University of North Carolina, where he wrote and acted in campus productions. Seeking professional training in drama, he continued at Harvard, studying playwriting in George Pierce Baker’s famed workshop. The theatrical discipline he absorbed—structure, scene, voice—shaped his later prose even as he moved away from the stage. He read widely and developed a vision of the novel as capacious and musical, capable of accommodating autobiography, travel, and social observation. This combination of Southern background, formal training, and literary aspiration would define the subjects and tone of his mature work.
After graduate study, Wolfe supported himself by teaching at New York University while revising early manuscripts and traveling in Europe. He shifted decisively from drama to prose, drafting vast, impressionistic narratives that demanded rigorous editing. At Charles Scribner’s Sons, editor Maxwell Perkins became a crucial advocate, helping to compress and shape Wolfe’s immense drafts into publishable form without extinguishing their sweeping rhythms. The partnership was formative for both writer and editor, illustrating the editorial art required by large-scale modern fiction. These years also broadened Wolfe’s sense of place and history, giving his work a transatlantic perspective that complemented its American core.
Look Homeward, Angel appeared in the late 1920s and brought Wolfe immediate notoriety and praise. Largely autobiographical in impulse, the novel’s panoramic portrait of a Southern mountain town combined youthful ardor with finely observed social detail. Its frankness upset some readers in his hometown, prompting local controversy, yet many critics celebrated its exuberance, sensory richness, and emotional intensity. Wolfe’s voice—surging, incantatory, deeply personal—felt both new and old, melding romantic expansiveness with modern psychological insight. The book established him as a major talent who sought to make a single life stand for a generation’s passage from provinciality to the wider world.
Wolfe expanded his canvas in Of Time and the River (mid-1930s), a vast sequel that followed a young writer’s journey through education, travel, and artistic apprenticeship. The novel’s success confirmed his status, even as its scale reignited debates about excess and control. During this period he also published From Death to Morning, a collection of shorter work, and The Story of a Novel, a reflective account of his methods and editorial collaboration. Critics continued to wrestle with the tension between Wolfe’s prodigality and his undeniable lyric power. Readers responded to the ambition: the hunger for experience and time’s passage rendered with symphonic sweep.
In his final years, Wolfe changed publishers, moving to Harper & Brothers and working with editor Edward Aswell. Travel in Europe during the 1930s sharpened his public voice, and he wrote essays warning about authoritarianism’s rise. His health declined toward the end of the decade, leading to hospitalization and an early death, leaving behind a massive, unfinished manuscript. From this material, Aswell assembled posthumous novels—The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)—as well as The Hills Beyond (1941), which included stories and fragments. These volumes extended Wolfe’s exploration of aspiration, disillusionment, and the search for belonging.
Wolfe’s legacy rests on the audacity of his scale and the musicality of his prose. He demonstrated how autobiographical material could be transformed into mythic narrative without abandoning social reality. Scholars continue to debate the role of his editors, the boundaries of authorial intention, and the best texts for study, yet his central achievement remains intact. Later writers, including figures of mid-century and postwar American literature, acknowledged his example—especially his permission to write long, emotionally direct books about becoming an artist. Commemorated by literary sites and taught in university courses, Wolfe’s work endures for its passion, capaciousness, and restless American energy.
The Greatest Works of Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
To the Reader
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical — that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels” cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
Part One
... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
1
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
This is a moment:
An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant (a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his improvident gullet. He wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking out a dangerous living by matching fighting cocks against the champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night spent in a village jail, with his champion dead on the field of battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket, and sometimes with the print of a farmer’s big knuckles on his reckless face. But he always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at harvest time he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he cast out his anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged young widow with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had been charmed by his air of travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund Kean. Every one said he should have been an actor.
The Englishman begot children — a daughter and four sons — lived easily and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of his wife’s harsh but honest tongue. The years passed, his bright somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the tall Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one morning when she came to nag him out of sleep she found him dead of an apoplexy. He left five children, a mortgage and — in his strange dark eyes which now stared bright and open — something that had not died: a passionate and obscure hunger for voyages.
So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and are concerned hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a boy named Oliver. How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg, how his cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended, when he was still fifteen, he had walked along a street in Baltimore, and seen within a little shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy — this is a longer tale. But I know that his cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man’s eyes, and that had led from Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia. As the boy looked at the big angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and nameless excitement possessed him. The long fingers of his big hands closed. He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world, to carve delicately with a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to carve an angel’s head.
Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man with a wooden mallet for a job. He became the stone cutter’s apprentice. He worked in that dusty yard five years. He became a stone cutter. When his apprenticeship was over he had become a man.
He never found it. He never learned to carve an angel’s head. The dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and letters fair and fine — but not the angel. And of all the years of waste and loss — the riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who memorized each accent of the noble rant, and strode muttering through the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands — these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?
He never found it, and he reeled down across the continent into the Reconstruction South — a strange wild form of six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized as classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy grin around the corners of his thin wailing mouth.
He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony. Within eighteen months he was a howling maniac again, his little business went smash while his foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia, his wife — whose life, the natives said, he had not helped to prolong — died suddenly one night after a hemorrhage.
So, all was gone again — Cynthia, the shop, the hard-bought praise of soberness, the angel’s head — he walked through the streets at dark, yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and all their indolence; but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he wilted under the town’s reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the flesh wasted on his own gaunt frame, that Cynthia’s scourge was doing vengeance now on him.
He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully.
His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health. He was thin as a rail and had a cough. He thought of Cynthia now, in the lonely and hostile town, and he became afraid. He thought he had tuberculosis and that he was going to die.
So, alone and lost again, having found neither order nor establishment in the world, and with the earth cut away from his feet, Oliver resumed his aimless drift along the continent. He turned westward toward the great fortress of the hills, knowing that behind them his evil fame would not be known, and hoping that he might find in them isolation, a new life, and recovered health.
The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they had in his youth.
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode westward across the mighty state. As he stared mournfully out the window at the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional little farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him. He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the people. And he thought of how he had set out to get order and position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought. I’m getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain. Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled by a series of accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an angel in a dusty shop, a slut’s pert wiggle of her hams as she passed by. He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations — a lean farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby — the strangeness of destiny stabbed him with fear. How came he here from the clean Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels. There was a droning interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the train moved on again across the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he left the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim of the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained slowly up the mountain road Oliver’s spirit lifted a little. It was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick blade of mist washed slowly around the rampart of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the hill toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away in purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau on which the town of Altamont was built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of four thousand people.
There were new lands. His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary War. It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina. And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South. When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get some reputation not only as a summer resort, but as a sanitarium for tuberculars. Several rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the greatest country estate in America — something in limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms. It was modelled on the chateau at Blois. There was also a vast new hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit of a commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native, recruited from the hill and country people in the surrounding districts. They were Scotch–Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of Cynthia’s estate. During the winter he rented a little shack at one edge of the town’s public square, acquired a small stock of marbles, and set up business. But he had little to do at first save to think of the prospect of his death. During the bitter and lonely winter, while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets became an object of familiar gossip to the townspeople. All the people at his boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room with great caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips. But he spoke to no one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of balsam. The great wound in Oliver began to heal. His voice was heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard behind him the voice of a man who was passing. And that voice, flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a picture that had lain dead in him for twenty years.
“Hit’s a comin’! Accordin’ to my figgers hit’s due June 11, 1886.”
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to Gettysburg and Armageddon.
“Who is that?” he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
“That’s Bacchus Pentland,” he said. “He’s quite a character. There are a lot of his folks around here.”
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly. Then, with a grin, he said:
“Has Armageddon come yet?”
“He’s expecting it any day now,” said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza. He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright piping noises in the Square. A restoring peace brooded over his great extended body. He thought of the loamy black earth with its sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the plumtree’s dropping blossoms. Then he heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the marbles, and he got hastily to his feet. He was drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.
“I tell you what,” said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful banter, “I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around all day on a good easy sofa.”
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Oliver with a flourishing bow. “Yes,” he said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, “I reckon you’ve caught me taking my constitutional. As a matter of fact I very rarely lie down in the daytime, but I’ve been in bad health for the last year now, and I’m not able to do the work I used to.”
He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an expression of hangdog dejection. “Ah, Lord! I don’t know what’s to become of me!”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza briskly and contemptuously. “There’s nothing wrong with you in my opinion. You’re a big strapping fellow, in the prime of life. Half of it’s only imagination. Most of the time we think we’re sick it’s all in the mind. I remember three years ago I was teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken down with pneumonia. Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it alive but I got through it somehow; I well remember one day I was sitting down — as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin’; the reason I remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he went out I saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally. ‘Why Eliza, what on earth,’ she said, just as soon as he had gone, ‘he tells me you’re spitting up blood every time you cough; you’ve got consumption as sure as you live.’ ‘Pshaw,’ I said. I remember I laughed just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it all; I just thought to myself, I’m not going to give into it, I’ll fool them all yet; ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ (I said),” she nodded her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, “‘and besides, Sally’ (I said) ‘we’ve all got to go some time, and there’s no use worrying about what’s going to happen. It may come tomorrow, or it may come later, but it’s bound to come to all in the end’.”
“Ah Lord!” said Oliver, shaking his head sadly. “You bit the nail on the head that time. A truer word was never spoken.”
Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin. How long is this to keep up? But she’s a pippin as sure as you’re born. He looked appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child’s stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric delight. Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful pursed mouth.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “if you’re getting your health back and spend a good part of your time lying around you ought to have something to occupy your mind.” She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying and produced a visiting card and two fat volumes. “My name,” she said portentously, with slow emphasis, “is Eliza Pentland, and I represent the Larkin Publishing Company.”
She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. Merciful God! A book agent! thought Gant.
“We are offering,” said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a fancy design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, “a book of poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside as well as Larkin’s Domestic Doctor and Book of Household Remedies, giving directions for the cure and prevention of over five hundred diseases.”
“Well,” said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb briefly, “I ought to find one that I’ve got out of that.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, nodding smartly, “as the fellow says, you can read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good of your body.”
“I like poetry,” said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing with interest at the section marked Songs of the Spur and Sabre. “In my boyhood I could recite it by the hour.”
He bought the books. Eliza packed her samples, and stood up looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.
“Doing any business?” she said.
“Very little,” said Oliver sadly. “Hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I’m a stranger in a strange land.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza cheerfully. “You ought to get out and meet more people. You need something to take your mind off yourself. If I were you, I’d pitch right in and take an interest in the town’s progress. We’ve got everything here it takes to make a big town — scenery, climate, and natural resources, and we all ought to work together. If I had a few thousand dollars I know what I’d do,”— she winked smartly at him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the hand — forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched. “Do you see this corner here — the one you’re on? It’ll double in value in the next few years. Now, here!” she gestured before her with the loose masculine gesture. “They’re going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they do —” she pursed her lips reflectively, “that property is going to be worth money.”
She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative hunger. The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her: her head was stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates — who owned a lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real value, the future value, first and second mortgages, and so on. When she had finished, Oliver said with the emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of Sydney:
“I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live — save a house to live in. It is nothing but a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets it all in the end.”
Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had uttered a damnable heresy.
“Why, say! That’s no way to talk!” she said. “You want to lay something by for a rainy day, don’t you?”
“I’m having my rainy day now,” he said gloomily. “All the property I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in.”
Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety. Then he turned back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a joy he thought he had lost forever.
The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills. It had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch–Englishman of that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution, looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting several children by one of the pioneer women. When he disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of Pentland.
The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza’s father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days. Major Pentland’s military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the native hills. This stronghold was never threatened until the closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of Sherman’s stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their attendant wives and children.
The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility. By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy. But because of its obvious superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain people it held a position of solid respect among them.
The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking. Like most rich personalities in strange families their powerful group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a trifle hollowed. The men were generally ruddy of face, and their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height, although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.
Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl. A younger sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully as “poor Jane’s scrofula.” There were six boys: Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven. Eliza was twenty-four.
The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
The effect of these years upon the oldest children was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and a desire to escape from the Major’s household as quickly as possible.
“Father,” Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, “I want you to meet Mr. Gant.”
Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel. Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will, glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual, greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink. The men amused themselves constantly with pocket knives.
Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant. He was a stocky fleshy man in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard, and the thick complacent features of his tribe.
“It’s W. O. Gant, isn’t it?” he asked in a drawling unctuous voice.
“Yes,” said Oliver, “that’s right.”
“From what Eliza’s been telling me about you,” said the Major, giving the signal to his audience, “I was going to say it ought to be L. E. Gant.”
The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the Pentlands.
“Whew!” cried Eliza, putting her hand to the wing of her broad nose. “I’ll vow, father! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.
The miserable old scoundrel, he thought. He’s had that one bottled up for a week.
“You’ve met Will before,” said Eliza.
“Both before and aft,” said Will with a smart wink.
When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: “And this — as the fellow says — is Uncle Bacchus.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bacchus beaming, “as large as life an’ twice as sassy.”
“They call him Back-us everywhere else,” said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, “but here in the family we call him Behind-us.”
“I suppose,” said Major Pentland deliberately, “that you’ve served on a great many juries?”
“No,” said Oliver, determined to endure the worst now with a frozen grin. “Why?”
“Because,” said the Major looking around again, “I thought you were a fellow who’d done a lot of COURTIN’.”
Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the others came in-Eliza’s mother, a plain worn Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father’s beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught.
And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth. And as their talk wore on, and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for he saw that he must die a stranger — that all, all but these triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death — must die.
And like a man who is perishing in the polar night, he thought of the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree, and ripe grain. Why here? O lost!
