Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe

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Harvard University Press, 2002 - Biography & Autobiography - 579 pages
This is a biography of American writer Thomas Wolfe by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald. The book follows Wolfe from improbable affairs to drunken brawls, from his mother's Old Kentucky Home, caricatured in Look Homeward Angel, to European capitals where he indulged his Faustian yearning to read, see and do everything.
 

Contents

A Secret Life
3
The Magical Campus
32
By God I Have Genius
65
I Shall Conquer the World
103
I Must Spin Out My Entrails
141
Like Some Blind Thing upon the Floor of the Sea
173
A Miracle of Good Luck
197
Penance More
233
The Famous American Novelist
312
Almost Every Kind of Worry
346
Unmistakable and Most Grievous Severance
384
A New World Is Before Me Now
422
The Posthumous Novels of Thomas Wolfe
464
Acknowledgments
485
Sources Abbreviations and Notes
493
Index
563

A Miserable Monstrous Misbegotten Life
272

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About the author (2002)

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian David Herbert Donald was born October 1, 1920 in Goodman, Miss. He married Aida DiPace in 1955, they had one child, Bruce Randall. He received an A.B. in 1941 from Millsaps College; an A.M. in 1942, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1946. Donald has been an associate professor of history at Smith College and a professor of history at Columbia University; Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University. He was also Harry C. Warren Professor of American History, chair of the graduate program in American civilization, and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Much of Donald's work involves exploring and interpreting the American Civil War and its central figure, Abraham Lincoln. Some recent works includes Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe, Lincoln, and Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 1996. He received Pulitzer Prizes in biography for both Charles Sumner and Look Homeward.

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