Literary Birthday – 3 October – Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe was born on 3 October 1900 and died on 15 September 1938.
Thomas Wolfe Quotes
- Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
- Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
- The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
- What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
- Men do not escape from life because life is dull, but life escapes from men because men are little.
Thomas Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century. He wrote four novels, many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. His books reflect American culture of the period. Wolfe was known for his autobiographical novels. His most famous was Look Homeward, Angel, published in 1929. The novel is a thinly veiled autobiography that recounts the early, unhappy years of Eugene Gant before he attends Harvard for graduate study. Following the book’s publication, Wolfe left teaching to write full-time. He had the faculty of almost total recall, and his fiction is characterised by an intense consciousness of scene and place. He explored themes of the search for identity and belonging, the passage of time, and the complex relationship between an individual and their home and family. His novels often feature protagonists grappling with their past and their place in the world.
Source for Image: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Wolfe_1937_1_(cropped).jpg
by Amanda Patterson
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