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LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. His mother ran a boarding house and his father a gravestone business; Wolfe was the youngest of their eight children. At fifteen, he went to the University of North Carolina, and later studied for an MA at Harvard. After graduating in 1920, Wolfe taught English in New York, and then spent several years living between the USA and Europe and trying to realize his ambitions as a writer. In 1925, he started a relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married costume designer whom he met aboard a ship returning from Europe. The following year, he began writing a sprawling autobiographical novel called O Lost, which was extensively revised and cut down by his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and published in 1929 under the title Look Homeward, Angel. It received a spectacular reception, and was followed by Of Time and the River in 1935, again heavily edited by Perkins. Wolfe subsequently broke with Perkins, and moved to a new publisher.

In July 1938, Wolfe caught pneumonia, which in a few weeks developed into tuberculosis. He died on 15 September, aged thirty-seven. At the time of his death, he had left two completed novels with his publisher; these were published posthumously as The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). In his obituary, The New York Times wrote: ‘The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius … There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down’.

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of The Historian (2005) and The Swan Thieves (2010), as well as introductions to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her work has been translated into forty languages. Kostova teaches and lectures internationally and is co-founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation in Bulgaria. She lives in North Carolina with her family.