Of Time and the River

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The second novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film, Genius, starring Jude Law, Colin Firth, Dominic West and Nicole Kidman. 
 
It is 1920 and Eugene Gant leaves the American South for Harvard, New York and Europe, determined to make his way as a writer. On the boat home, he meets Esther Jack, the woman who is to dominate his life. Autobiographical, vital and passionate, Wolfe's second novel blazes with energy and life. 
 
Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is also now available in Penguin Classics. Together, the two novels tell the story of Eugene Gant, Wolfe's fictional alter-ego, as he grows up in a dysfunctional family in the American South and discovers his true vocation as a writer. 
 
This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian.

In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life

He had that flair for the extravagant and fantastic which has been an American characteristic from Irving and Poe to Dashiell Hammett

Wolfe wrote as one inspired. No one in his generation had his command of language, his passion, his energy

The product of an immense exuberance, organic in its form, kinetic, and drenched with the love of life ... I rejoice over Mr. Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe (Author) Thomas Wolfe was born in North Carolina in 1900. His mother ran a boarding house and his father a gravestone business; Wolfe was the youngest of their eight children. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published in 1929, followed by Of Time and the River in 1935, both heavily revised by his influential editor, Max Perkins. Wolfe died in 1938 from tuberculosis, aged thirty-seven. Elizabeth Kostova (Introducer) Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the novels The Historian (2005) and The Swan Thieves (2010).

Thomas Wolfe

Elizabeth Kostova

Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life ... It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience

Elizabeth Kostova, author of 'The Historian'

Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished

Thomas Wolfe

Praise for Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life ... It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm s ...

Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished

Books by Thomas Wolfe

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