Notes For March 8th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the classic second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. It was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, a semi-autobiographical novel, picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off. It opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do his graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside the stifling confines of his Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the bohemian lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he's initially shocked and repulsed to learn that Starwick is gay. But as they engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

In 2016, the acclaimed feature film Genius was released. It told the story of the close yet tumultuous relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and Max Perkins (Colin Firth), his editor at Scribner's.

Perkins had previously discovered legendary writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and edited their work for publication. He was also the only editor to recognize the genius of Thomas Wolfe and sign him to a book contract.

Colin Firth and Jude Law give excellent performances as Perkins and Wolfe, as they battle over editing down Wolfe's impossibly long novels for publication, the brilliant writer's lack of discipline, fondness for whiskey, and burgeoning ego taking a toll on their relationship.

Directed by Michael Grandage, working from an excellent screenplay by John Logan, Genius is a film not to be missed.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes."

- Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a documentary on Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2023

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way:

Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2023

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the classic second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. It was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, a semi-autobiographical novel, picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off. It opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do his graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside the stifling confines of his Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the bohemian lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he's initially shocked and repulsed to learn that Starwick is gay. But as they engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

In 2016, the acclaimed feature film Genius was released. It told the story of the close yet tumultuous relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and Max Perkins (Colin Firth), his editor at Scribner's.

Perkins had previously discovered legendary writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and edited their work for publication. He was also the only editor to recognize the genius of Thomas Wolfe and sign him to a book contract.

Colin Firth and Jude Law give excellent performances as Perkins and Wolfe, as they battle over editing down Wolfe's impossibly long novels for publication, the brilliant writer's lack of discipline, fondness for whiskey, and burgeoning ego taking a toll on their relationship.

Directed by Michael Grandage, working from an excellent screenplay by John Logan, Genius is a film not to be missed.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a presentation on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2022

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way:

Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2022

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

In 2016, the acclaimed feature film Genius was released. It told the story of the close yet tumultuous relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and Max Perkins (Colin Firth), his editor at Scribner's.

Perkins had previously discovered legendary writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and edited their work for publication. He was also the only editor to recognize the genius of Thomas Wolfe and sign him to a book contract.

Colin Firth and Jude Law give excellent performances as Perkins and Wolfe, as they battle over editing down Wolfe's impossibly long novels for publication, the brilliant writer's lack of discipline, fondness for whiskey, and burgeoning ego taking a toll on their relationship.

Directed by Michael Grandage, working from an excellent screenplay by John Logan, Genius is a film not to be missed.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a presentation on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2021

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way:

Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2019

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

In 2016, the acclaimed feature film Genius was released. It told the story of the close yet tumultuous relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and Max Perkins (Colin Firth), his editor at Scribner's.

Perkins had previously discovered legendary writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and edited their work for publication. He was also the only editor to recognize the genius of Thomas Wolfe and sign him to a book contract.

Colin Firth and Jude Law give excellent performances as Perkins and Wolfe, as they battle over editing down Wolfe's impossibly long novels for publication, the brilliant writer's lack of discipline, fondness for whiskey, and burgeoning ego taking a toll on their relationship.

Directed by Michael Grandage, working from an excellent screenplay by John Logan, Genius is a film not to be missed.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a presentation on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2018

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2018

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

In 2016, the acclaimed feature film Genius was released. It told the story of the close yet tumultuous relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and Max Perkins (Colin Firth), his editor at Scribner's.

Perkins had previously discovered legendary writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and edited their work for publication. He was also the only editor to recognize the genius of Thomas Wolfe and sign him to a book contract.

Colin Firth and Jude Law give excellent performances as Perkins and Wolfe, as they battle over editing down Wolfe's impossibly long novels for publication, the brilliant writer's lack of discipline, fondness for whiskey, and burgeoning ego taking a toll on their relationship.

Directed by Michael Grandage, working from a great screenplay by John Logan, Genius is a film not to be missed.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a presentation on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2017

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2017

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a presentation on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2016

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2016

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick. After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is Man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false - yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading from Thomas Wolfe's classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2013

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. It was a sequel to Wolfe's highly acclaimed classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant.

Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick.

After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. But, when he and Starwick engage in a series of soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant loses his homophobia and accepts his gay friend.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"The modern picture of the artist began to form: the poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever - in short, to be the bohemian." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading from Thomas Wolfe's classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2012

---

Calling All Non-Fiction Writers!

---

Are you a non-fiction writer? Well, whether you write short articles or are working on a non-fiction book, we at the Internet Writing Workshop have the perfect outlet for you.

Our NFiction discussion and critiquing list is a forum where you can discuss the craft of writing non-fiction and receive critiques of your work. As with all the Workshop's writing lists, the NFiction list is free to join.

For more information, see the Internet Writing Workshop website or e-mail us. You'll be glad you did!

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory.

The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing.

The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his classic first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked.

But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute.

Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published.

Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained:

Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife - and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are "viciously insane" and your "big overgrown body" ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob.

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled... It is like death... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do - I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2012

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was Wolfe's sequel to his highly acclaimed classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. (1929)

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off.

The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant.

Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy.

Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick.

After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer.

He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words.

It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River.

In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia.

The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"The modern picture of the artist began to form: the poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever - in short, to be the bohemian." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading from Thomas Wolfe's classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2011

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary English poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory. The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing. The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his first (and classic) novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute. Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published. Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained that "Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife -- and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are 'viciously insane' and your 'big overgrown body' ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob."

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled.... It is like death.... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do -- I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!

Notes For March 8th, 2011

---

This Day In Writing History

---

On March 8th, 1935, Of Time and the River, the second novel by the legendary American writer Thomas Wolfe, was published. The book was Wolfe's sequel to his highly acclaimed classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. (1929)

Of Time and the River, subtitled A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, was a semi-autobiographical novel that picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off. The novel opens with Wolfe's protagonist, 22-year-old Eugene Gant, leaving North Carolina to do graduate studies at Harvard University.

An aspiring writer, Gant studies play writing and strikes up a close friendship with Francis Starwick, his professor's assistant. Starwick, a Midwesterner and cultured, fastidious scholar, enjoys getting drunk with Gant and talking about writing and philosophy. Feeling little support for his literary aspirations from his professors and his family, Gant finds a kindred spirit in Starwick.

After his father dies, Gant returns to North Carolina, but having tasted life outside his stifling Southern home town, he determines to become a writer. He goes off with Francis Starwick to Europe, where he embarks on an existentialist odyssey as he and Starwick try find happiness and enlightenment as they live the lives of artists. Ultimately, Gant returns to the United States.

That's just a threadbare outline of the plot. Of Time and the River is a huge epic novel that originally clocked in at over 300,000 words. It took Thomas Wolfe and his editor at Scribner's a few years just to edit the finished manuscript down to a publishable length, which turned out to be just over 800 pages of Wolfe's dazzling, richly descriptive, philosophical prose.

Unfortunately, the cuts included numerous important passages pertaining to the friendship of Eugene Gant and Francis Starwick, including the revelation of Starwick's homosexuality, which was only briefly mentioned in Of Time and the River. In the cut material, which would be published later as The Starwick Episodes, Starwick's homosexuality is given an open and honest treatment, as he is depicted as a tormented gay man who longs to find acceptance and escape the closet.

Gant's reaction is also honest - he is initially shocked and repulsed. Yet, when he and Starwick engage in soul-baring conversations about sexuality, Gant begins to lose his homophobia. The character of Starwick was based on Wolfe's college friend, playwright Kenneth Raisback, a gay man who was murdered - a crime that would never be solved.

Sadly, Thomas Wolfe died suddenly from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. He was 38 years old.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"The modern picture of the artist began to form: the poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever - in short, to be the bohemian." - Thomas Wolfe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Thomas Wolfe's classic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Enjoy!

Notes For August 10th, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On August 10th, 1637, an Englishman named Edward King drowned at sea. His tragic death would inspire his college friend, the legendary British poet and polemicist John Milton, to compose a poem of elegy in his memory. The poem, Lycidas, published three months after King's death, would prove to be one of the earliest and most famous poems in the elegiac tradition.

Some three centuries later, Milton's poem would inspire a legendary American novelist. It gave him the title of his first novel and influenced his writing. The novelist was Thomas Wolfe, and the title of his first (and classic) novel, Look Homeward, Angel, comes from the following passage in Milton's Lycidas:

. . . Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

The angel in Lycidas was St. Michael. The angel in Thomas Wolfe's novel was based on a statue his father had bought for his tombstone shop:

No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it came from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore the look of some soft stone idiocy.

The real angel statue was placed on the grave of a minister's wife in Asheville - Wolfe's North Carolina hometown. In the novel, the angel statue is bought by the town madam and placed on the grave of a young prostitute. Many people in Asheville were appalled and infuriated by Look Homeward, Angel, and not just because the novel's content was a shocker for readers in 1929 - the year it was published. Wolfe's characters were thinly veiled portraits of his friends, neighbors, and other townspeople. A review of the novel in a local newspaper declared that "Wolfe's First Is Novel of Revolt: Former Asheville Writer Turns in Fury upon North Carolina and the South."

Wolfe's sister Mabel recalled how the people of Asheville reacted: "They were denouncing him from the roofs and the corners and the housetops." In a letter to Mabel, Wolfe complained that "Apparently you can rob banks, be a crooked lawyer, swill corn whiskey, commit adultery with your neighbor's wife -- and be considered a fine, lovable, misunderstood fellow; but if you try to make something true and beautiful you are 'viciously insane' and your 'big overgrown body' ought to be dragged through the streets by a lynching mob."

Finishing the letter, Thomas Wolfe summed up his fate this way: "Now I feel as if I have been exiled.... It is like death.... If then, I am dead to people who once knew me and cared for me, there is nothing more to say or do -- I must go on into a new world and a new life, with love and sorrow for what I have lost."

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Quote Of The Day

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"This is the artist then; life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." - Thomas Wolfe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of John Milton's classic poem, Lycidas. Enjoy!