Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe

by David Herbert Donald

Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow of prose was shaped into novels by his editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins. In this definitive and compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Herbert Donald dismantles that myth and demonstrates that Wolfe was a boldly aware experimental artist who, like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, deliberately pushed at the boundaries of the modern novel. Donald takes a new measure of this complex, tormented man as he reveals Wolfe's difficult childhood, when he was buffeted between an alcoholic father and a resentful mother; his "magical" years at the University of North Carolina, where his writing talent first flourished; his rise to literary fame after repeated rejection; and the full story of Wolfe's passionate affair with Aline Bernstein, including their intimate letters.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Classics, American History, Reference, Books About Books

608 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Majoring in history and sociology, Donald earned his bachelor degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his PhD in 1946 under the eminent, leading Lincoln scholar, James G. Randall at the University of Illinois. Randall as a mentor had a big influence on Donald's life and career, and encouraged his protégé to write his dissertation on Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon. The dissertation eventually became his first book, Lincoln's Herndon, published in 1948. After graduating, he taught at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and, from 1973, Harvard University. He also taught at Smith College, the University of North Wales, Princeton University, University College London and served as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. At Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Harvard he trained dozens of graduate students including Jean H. Baker, William J. Cooper, Jr., Michael Holt, Irwin Unger, and Ari Hoogenboom.

He received the Pulitzer Prize twice (1961 and 1988), several honorary degrees, and served as president of the Southern Historical Association. Donald also served on the editorial board for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.

David H. Donald was the Charles Warren Professor of American History (emeritus from 1991) at Harvard University. He wrote over thirty books, including well received biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Sumner. He specialized in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, and in the history of the South.

Reviews

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography is the standard by which every subsequent work on Thomas Wolfe should be judged. A thorough and well documented account of Wolfe's life, travels, obsessions, and fears, it also provides a critical study of how his work came to be published. In many respects, Donald's biography is just as monumental in scope and length as Wolfe's novels. And I think it will give readers an understanding of just how Wolfe can appeal to them differently at different times of their lives. If I had a note on my own reception of Wolfe, I should say that his novels intimidate you in your teens and twenties, capture you in your thirties, stray from you in your forties, become alienated from you in your fifties, and then become wistfully yearned for in your sixties. If I make it to my seventies, I'll no doubt feel differently about them, then, too.

[David Allen Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best biographies I have ever read about one of the greatest and most tragic of the nation's early 20th century writers. I read Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River and The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home again years ago, and while they are uneven in quality, reading them was literally a life-changing experience. Thomas Wolfe captured perfectly how each of us actually think and ponder and live, and wasn't afraid to write exactly how life is, even when it is tedious or repetitive or inconsistent. This wonderfully written biography illuminates Wolfe's life and tragically young death in a way that any reader will come to a greater appreciation of Wolfe's career and life. Donald also takes some time to explain what happened to Wolfe's disorganized manuscripts after his death and the significant roles editors played in shaping them while yet making it clear the stories are Wolfe's. Highly recommended.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime. This is a painstakingly researched, cogently and even gracefully written biography about an author who was anything BUT cogent or organized. As a Wolfe fan, I am glad it exists. Thank you, David Donald!

[Paul Gleason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald's work provides tremendous insight into Wolfe's writing process, personal life, political views, encounters with literary friends, childhood...you name it. An excellent historian, Donald excels at providing an objective vision of this most subjective of visionary writers.

The best part of the book, in my estimation, is the final chapter, in which Donald analyzes Wolfe's final two, posthumous novels: The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again. The conclusions at which he arrives about how much of the books are Wolfe's and how much are his editor Aswell's are surprising and fascinating. Let's just say that Donald changed my opinion about what Wolfe's finest novel is.

This is a must-read biography of a major novelist whose books are sadly under-read today. Faulkner himself considered Wolfe to be the greatest novelist of his generation, Wolfe's lyricism and autobiographical prose influenced Kerouac and the other Beats, and Norman Mailer had nothing but good things to say about Look Homeward, Angel.

Read Wolfe. He's a giant - a voice of passionate earnestness in our time of ironic detachment.

Read Donald. He gets to the heart of Wolfe like no one else.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a long one, but I finished it rather quickly due in large part to its read-i-ness. Wolfe was certainly an oddball and it's easy to see why Donald (best known as a Lincoln biographer) was interested in writing his bio; Wolfe saved every piece of paper he applied a pen to, so there's plenty of documentation for his rather short life, and also his life is a kind of fever dream full of emotional turmoil and contentious personal relationships. I imagine a less tasteful biographer could spin quite a juicy tale about Wolfe. Anyway, a fine read indeed.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 (first reading); 4 (second reading)

What I originally said:
A well-written biography that doesn't excuse or shy away from Wolfe's character and his excesses, nor skimp on admiration when that's due. Written for those who have already read Wolfe more than for those who haven't. This seems to be the comprehensive biography that might be the last word. The final pages on the posthumous works are quite good.

To add: this book is enjoyable not for the actual life of Wolfe, which seems sad, "immature" (a word that comes up a fair bit), boorish, and soused, but for how Donald writes about it. There is very little excuse provided for Wolfe's often angry, envious, paranoid, and hate-filled behaviour. (Possibly a medical and/or psychological opinion might diagnose him as this or that.) That Donald persisted despite Wolfe's character and a talent that appeared and disappeared (he wasn't a genius, as far as I'm concerned) indicates how his love for Wolfe's best writing triumphed over his opinion of the man's worst traits. This benefits all readers.

[Paul Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome biography of a fascinating American writer whose books inspired many beat writers of the 1950's.

[Irving Koppel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bigger than Life"

Thomas Wolfe was not only big in size,he was also big in his appetites.He could eat massive
amounts of food ,drink until he dropped,engage in sexual orgies,write interminably and exercise the
use of massive amounts of vocabulary. He was a man of conflicted ideas: he loved his native South,but
lived in the North;he was stingy,yet giving;he hated criticism,but begged for it;he was completely
disorganized but welcomed others to organize him;he was anti-Semitic,yet the love of his life was a
Jewish woman. Still,as confused as his life was,he was able to write several insightful and successful
novels,short stories and articles. David Herbert Donald his written a lengthy tome for which he must
have searched through every scrap of paper that Wolfe has ever written.

Donald is Southern historian.Nevertheless, he does a fine job of critiquing Wolfe's works. In
addition he provides us with a very complete biography of the author from childhood until his untimely
death at age 38. Had Wolfe been more disciplined,he might have lived to a ripe old age. Nevertheless,
in the short span of his life he left us enough material for numerous novels and biographies.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Donald presents an unvarnished, though sympathetic, portrait of Thomas Wolfe. Reading this biography helped me to understand Wolfe better, and to understand the wide-ranging criticism and acclaim that he has received. After reading, my opinion of Wolfe declined, but I now have a more complete picture of him, his time, and his place among early 20th century novelists.

One small complaint: The book has a strangely abrupt ending. Wolfe dies in the penultimate sentence. And he's buried in the last sentence. Nothing about the funeral, reactions or eulogies from family, friends, or colleagues, and nothing about what became of his manuscripts. It does include a helpful "postscript" chapter on his posthumous novels and generally how they were put together, but I would have loved to see more detail about the making of his 3rd and 4th novels.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some editors are easy going with syntax as they edit manuscripts, others heavy-handed. When Wolfe died at age 37 he left a mini-mountain of disorganized handwritten and typed pages that editors endeavored to organize into publishable works. Necessary heavy-handedness was required on some and many of the novelist’s stylistic wordings were overly trimmed. Wolfe in many ways never outgrew adolescence and led a rather jumbled life. It’s doubtful that even in his lifetime that his typescripts could have resulted in publication without strong editorial supervision. Moreover, he was a heavy drinker and sometime bedroom playboy; his largely autobiographical novels and short stories featured candid descriptions, so much so that libel suits were threatened and a couple even brought to court.

[Carol Chapin · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I recently reviewed Thomas Wolfe's book “Look Homeward, Angel”, I told you that when I was twenty-five, he was one of the bright lights in my young adult life. He was a symbol of all my yearning for – I wasn’t sure what. But he expressed all the intensity that I felt. I romanticized and idealized the man. I saw his life as a tragic trajectory of strong emotion and angst while leaving behind a legacy of beauty through his words.

Recently I read “Look Homeward - A Life of Thomas Wolfe”. And I found that the reality couldn't have been more different.

Thomas Wolfe is not a man I would have liked to have known - at least, not up close and personal.

First, there was his appearance. He was a large man, tall, bulky and ungainly. In later years, pictures show that he tended toward fat. He was so tall that he often had to stand when he wrote, writing on top of the refrigerator. Normal chairs cramped him. Usually, personality will outshine physical appearance. You can’t judge a man by his cover.

But Wolfe was careless in the way he dressed. He left his clothes in piles around his apartment and would put on whatever articles of clothing were nearest him. And he often didn’t bathe. It was noticed by those around him, even when he was a popular “man about campus” in college.

In spite of that, he had many women in his life, both temporary and long-term. He had the sort of large personality that many women find attractive. But he was careless about his sex life and inconsiderate of his partners. Many of his relationships were stormy, marked by frequent and bitter fights. Yet this didn’t stop women from being attracted to him.

He never seemed to grow up. His family paid for this education through graduate school, and his mother gave him money through most of his early life. But he was careless with money. When he finally started earning royalties from his early books, his publisher didn’t give them to him all at once. His publishing house, Charles Scribner and Sons, kept his royalties in a bank account which he would draw down only as he needed living expenses. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, served as a father figure to Wolfe in his early writing years.

He knew most of the major authors of his day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway. Some he liked and got along with, some he did not. Wolfe was sometimes jealous and couldn’t stand criticism.

His antisemitism was obvious, in spite of the fact that the most significant and longest romantic relationship in his young life was with a married Jewish set designer twenty years his senior.

He was a drinker. Perhaps it was the intense emotions that his writing stirred up that drove him to drink. But he could also be what they call a “mean drunk”. He would arrive late at parties, dominate the conversation, and pick fights with people who displeased him. One key incident he relates in his writing is about a visit to Munich, Germany, in 1928. At Octoberfest there, he got very drunk on strong German beer, became belligerent and got into a brawl. He had to be treated at a hospital, but this became grist for his novels.

Wolfe’s books were extremely autobiographical, and this was both his blessing and his bane. “Look Homeward, Angel” was blatantly autobiographical, with most of the characters easily identifiable as members of his family and people in his hometown. He struggled to escape being labelled as strictly an autobiographical novelist, but his writing kept veering back to himself as the protagonist.

He was from the South. Although he sometimes looked like a country bumpkin, he was actually superbly educated. He attended Harvard for post-graduate school and had “the best formal education of any American novelist of his day.” He excelled in school. He was influenced by such great and non-traditional authors as Proust and James Joyce. He sprinkled his writing with classical references. In one long section in “Look Homeward, Angel”, he had unattributed quotes from various works of classical literature after each paragraph. It all worked.

His writing- work-in-progress was a hodgepodge. He would write sketches or paragraphs or longer pieces and throw the handwritten pages into a big crate in the middle of his living room floor. Often, his editors or agents had to help him sort it out. One of his agents, Elizabeth Nowell, would go through these pages to assemble short stories that he could then sell. After Wolfe died, his editor went through the crate and was able to put together and publish two long and successful posthumous books.

Some claim that it was Wolfe’s editors – Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell - who made Thomas Wolfe a successful author. But you can’t deny the graphic beauty of the passages and scenes that Wolfe created.

In short, Thomas Wolfe was a mad genius. But mad geniuses are not created for this life.

I’ve written of Wolfe’s death at age 38 of a brain infection. It was tragic, yes. But I think it was the tragic way that his life ended that helped make him such a romantic figure in my mind. Dying can burnish a man’s reputation. When I was twenty-five, I needed him to be a tragic hero. But at seventy-plus, I’ve learned that this doesn’t really exist. Perhaps that is one of the worst parts of growing up.

[Emil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this three times.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, comprehensive biography of one of my favorite authors. Donald did a tremendous amount of research, reading all of Wolfe's writings, including the many drafts of his stories and novels, which required considerable editing and paring down before they could be published. Wolfe was well known as an autobiographical novelist and I thought that Donald gave too little attention to the differences, though slight in some cases, between fictional characters and their real-life counterparts. After all, as was explained in "You Can't Go Home Again," the real-life people were just the starting point. Wolfe then used his imagination to create the characters in his books.

The book reviews Wolfe's too-short life in detail, almost day by day in some sections. Wolfe was a fascinating and talented writer, considered a genius by many, but he certainly had his flaws, including a mercurial temperament, a serious drinking problem, sexual issues, and racist and anti-semitic attitudes that he tried, not always successfully, to keep out of his writings. Despite all of that, he was able to turn out thousands of pages of intense, vividly descriptive prose, and stories that many could identify with. Among the relationships explored in this biography was Wolfe's close relationship with his editor Maxwell Perkins, who became a father figure for him and who certainly went way beyond the normal function of an editor in developing Wolfe's talent and assisting him with his various personal and financial crises. Donald does a great job of describing how Wolfe's often jumbled and overly long drafts were converted into novels that won awards and are regarded as classics.

Donald is sharply critical of Edward C. Alswell, who became Wolfe's editor after he had a falling out with Perkins, and makes the case that Alswell went too far past the role of an ethical editor in taking Wolfe's incomplete writings and molding them into the novels (The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again) that were published after Wolfe's death. I thought that this criticism was a bit overblown. Wolfe was a unique writer. Words flowed from his pen like water pouring over Niagara Falls. He cherished every word and cutting a novel down to a size that could reasonably be expected to be digested by a reader was a herculean task for any editor, particularly since Wolfe resisted every attempt at a reduction. From what I read, Alswell's contributions to making Wolfe's novels comprehensible and of reasonable size were little different from what Perkins did. Donald included some excerpts of changes made by Alswell to Wolfe's drafts and I didn't find the changes to be that outrageous. There was some re-ordering and some shortening, but the words and the thoughts were Wolfe's. In my view, Wolfe was really trying to accomplish two things in his writing, tell the story of the development of a writer, and tell the greater story of America. The writings that he left behind at his death were consistent with those themes and I personally thought, especially in the case of You Can't Go Home Again, that the writings were stitched together beautifully. Because of Wolfe's personality and the way that he wrote, this was basically what an editor signed up for. It's difficult to argue with the results and I don't think that a credible claim can be made that the thoughts, themes, and words were not Wolfe's.

Donald has many helpful references to other scholarly works about Wolfe's writing, and I will be checking some of those out. This is a well written, readable and interesting biography and I certainly recommend it to anyone interested in the life and writings of Thomas Wolfe.

[David Dowdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal tips for writers!

Thomas Wolfe was inhumane to African Americans and Jews. He wrote in autobiographical style that won little praise from family and friends whose odd traits and habits were exposed.

If you can set his aside his awful bigotry and gossip, you might admit his prodigious word count and exposition are something to behold. This is lofty, semi-gothic writing about people from late nineteenth and early twentieth century mid-Southern America. From agrarian to urban, everyday life in the South is captured well.

Of course, Wolfe's ad nauseum writing is hardly acceptable to today's reader who’s more interested in fast-paced nuanced plots. However, a writer could do worse by taking style points. Even a thriller needs to jack up the antagonist's color into a distinct sketch.

Writers looking for insight of how to draw characters should consider his gigantic character profiles. There are no cardboard cut-out roles in his books. The people and their lives are the plot! They are drawn with constant fresh insight. Together they comprise the story.

If you write well but haphazardly like Thomas Wolfe, then you're going to need a good editor like Maxwell Perkins who had the ability to draw clarity from Wolfe's abstract without losing his art. But that's not going to happen because the world of writing and publishing houses have lost their innocence.

Good writers have traditionally been born of themselves and only needed a pilot. Yet today they are a microcosm of the writing-publishing world. They master editing and self-publishing like professionals and write delicious books like Look Homeward, Angel at half the word count with double the intensity.

Still, one looks back at Thomas Wolfe with esteem.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a sense in which any biography of Wolfe is somewhat redundant, considering all of Wolfe's novels are semi-autobiographical; nonetheless, Donald has the benefit of coming later than all the other biographers like Turnbull and Nowell, meaning he has more material to work with, allowing him to fill in the details and correct the facts. As a result, this book does a good job of recounting Wolfe's life while filling in critical context and being unafraid to interject with evaluations—like his relation to other contemporary American authors, his relation to the Southern Agrarians, and his more problematic aspects, e.g., racism and anti-Semitism.

[Joseph J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the brilliant and tragically doomed American writer Thomas Wolfe recorded by the distinguished American historian and Pulitzer Prize winner David Herbert Donald. Wolfe was a physical giant of a man with talent and excesses to match, excesses of sexuality, food, slovenliness, and the bigotry of his Southern upbringing and time. How did a box of thoughts and papers become a great American novel? In the hands of an award winning Civil War writer, Wolfe's Southern gothic family, upbringing, failings and fate are richly recorded.

[Ann Otto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography is considered the best on Thomas Wolfe and it is clearly the case. I recently finished reading all of Wolfe's major novels and the information provided in the introductions is based on Donald's book. His research into Wolfe's life reflects perfectly Wolfe's autobiography as he relates it in his novels. However, we learn much about Wolfe's later years and relationships that take place after the period of his life described in the novels.

[S Daly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not your typical biography, it depicts Wolfe's eccentric life but the people around him and other writers. Something that has not been explored before. Still not the book for me and if you are expecting a clean biography this one is not it. It was nice still too see what Wolfe went through in his life his struggles as a writer and in his personal life.

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Great Bio.

[Bill Tyroler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can’t say I keep up with literary trends, but I imagine that one-time phenomenon Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe is now well out of fashion. Wasn’t always that way, https://www.proquest.com/docview/2155... “in the postwar era, … the literary culture was heavily influenced by the towering legacy of Thomas Wolfe … Wolfe lingered long on [Norman] Mailer’s mind. In 1999 Mailer listed Look Homeward, Angel as not only one of his six favorite books, but as one of his top ten American novels[.]” Mailer, to be sure, isn’t for all tastes. And even if you think (as I do) that at least some of Mailer’s work is touched by genius, you may also conclude (as I do) that at least some is puerile. Maybe the same might be said of Wolfe.

Genius might be a bit much; it’s not a term to be thrown about lightly. But Wolfe, in David Herbert Donald’s telling, was clearly a child prodigy, coupling a love for language and reading with a capacious memory. Problem is, everything about Wolfe was disheveled — from attire to hygiene to relationships to money management to, inevitably, his writing. Maxwell Perkins is famously (and justly) credited with taking the shambolic draft of Wolfe’s first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” and shaping it into a coherent classic. Perkins, who comes across as a bit saint-like, coaxed and prodded out of Wolfe a second, commercially if not critically successful novel.* Wolfe’s thanks? Insecure and resentful that his success was being attributed to Perkins, he unceremoniously ditched the latter for another editor, Edward Aswell. Wolfe died before Aswell could publish more novels, but the latter formed two posthumous novels from typically sprawling, unfinished manuscripts Wolfe had left. Donald persuasively argues that Aswell did more than edit them, that he unethically added his own, critical content, such that much of it became Aswell’s, not Wolfe’s. voice.

What, then, is to be made of Wolfe’s place in the literary canon? A first, arguably great novel (“Look Homeward, Angel … has become an American classic,” https://www.britannica.com/biography/...), followed by a mediocre one and then two that arguably aren’t fully his? Back to the initial possibility that Wolfe has fallen out of favor: having just re-read “Look Homeward, Angel” for the first time in a half-century, I can readily see why that might be so. First (and of lesser importance), Wolfe’s ready employment of classical allusions transgresses the current anti-Western zeitgeist afflicting the academy (the title is itself, of course, from Milton). Second, Wolfe’s racism is manifest. As Donald makes clear, that’s who Wolfe was; no Twain-like irony in his casual and profligate use of the n-word. And, as Donald also shows, Wolfe was certainly anti-Semitic. That, too, is there in “Look Homeward, Angel,” but in much more muted tones than the racism he wears so comfortably as a second skin.** I’d be surprised, then, if the study of Wolfe is much in evidence in English departments.

Curiously, the love of Wolfe’s life was Aline Bernstein, a renowned set designer who just happened to be Jewish. (Not so curiously, she was 20 years his senior; to say that Wolfe had unresolved issues regarding his mother would be belaboring the obvious.) His treatment of her wasn’t just shabby, it was unbelievably pathological — he recruited his mother, in effect, to travel from Asheville to New York City and engineer his breakup with Bernstein. Why Bernstein had so little self-respect that she continued to carry a torch for him after being subjected to his and his mother’s ethnic slurs must remain a sad mystery.***

Incidentally, this is a fine biography, well worth reading whether or not you care for Wolfe.

* Weirdly, someone thought that the story of Wolfe and Perkins would make a fine subject for a commercial movie. And named it … “Genius” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_...). Reviews haven’t been kind.

**Eli N. Evans once observed that anti-Semitism in the South was subdued, because the Jewish population wasn’t sufficient to form a critical mass. But the black population of course was large enough, and acted as a lightning rod for white racism. There wasn’t enough energy left over, and the small population wasn’t worth the effort, to support anti-Semitic outbursts. Seems like a plausible theory, but it’s not an iron rule of behavior in any event. Very few Jewish families existed in Wolfe’s Asheville, but his mother was, as Donald shows, rabidly anti-Semitic, a trait that Wolfe shared.

*** Wolfe seems to have been enormously attractive to females and, Donald implies was rewarded with a large number of one-night stands and short-term flings. Probably didn’t hurt that he was 6’ 6”, powerfully built and at least reasonably attractive. But — just guessing here — celebrity probably makes for the best musk. It has always been thus. Nonetheless, Bernstein appears to have occupied a unique place.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good biography of Thomas Wolfe. I had reead another bio a number of years ago called "The Window of Memory, The Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe" by Richard S. Kennedy and published in 1962 by the University of North Carolina Press. An additional book examining his relationship with Aline Bernstein titled "My Other Loneliness" contains their letters to each other and was edited by Suzanne Stutman and published in 1983 by University of North Carolina Press. If you have an appreciation for Thomas Wolfe's writing, some insite into his personal life can only help in getting the feel for the man and his writings.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendous insight on Wolfe's life and work, and when Wolfe dies in the book, I felt like someone I knew had died. To me, that's a great biography.

[Ella Mi Amor Orwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, a plethora of information and a glimpse into the author. Truely a slice of life!