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Of Time and the River by Wolfe Thomas
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Of Time and the River (original 1935; edition 2016)

by Wolfe Thomas (Author)

Series: Of Time and the River (1-2)

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6391036,228 (3.99)30
The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe.
Member:marfec2012
Title:Of Time and the River
Authors:Wolfe Thomas (Author)
Info:Penguin Classics (2016), 1026 pages
Collections:Postponed
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Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe (1935)

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I read this because of Kerouac's enthusiasm for this novel. An epic tale of a young man who leaves his home in Carolina to study in Massachusetts, teaching English in New York, before embarking on a trip to Europe to write. Set in the 1930s, the protagonist describes the places he visits in full detail, but I noticed he used the word "grey" all too often. The language is very poetic, and reading it made me feel as if the author was talking directly to me, inside my head, intimately; never forgetting his home and family, his close friends. His descriptions of the English accent was highly amusing (pg 680). Enjoyable and highly readable. I can see how this author influenced Kerouac. ( )
  AChild | Feb 23, 2023 |
I was surprised by the depth of this book. It's not an easy read but the characters are compelling, the scenes on trains are very well described, and the overall sense of a boy growing up analyzed in depth. ( )
  Lapsus16 | Dec 2, 2022 |
The content-order of the four major novels:
Look Homeward, Angel
Of Time and the River
The Web and the Rock
You Can't Go Home Again ( )
  KENNERLYDAN | Jul 11, 2021 |
This is the sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's massive first novel. It is a sequel that almost doubles the first novel's length. In much of Wolfe’s writing, lengthy descriptions of train journeys impart a sense of movement and change. In Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth, his hero, Eugene, embarks upon a trip northward. Having left college in his native state, Eugene believes that he has become a witness to a vast and panoramic series of images which, taken together, reveal the many faces of America itself. He feels a sense of escape from the dark and mournful mystery of the South to the freedom and bright promise of the North, with its shining cities and extravagant hopes. The plains, peaks, and valleys that shape the landscape over which he passes, as well as the innumerable towns and cities along the way, suggest to him the limitless diversity of the United States.

Other images, mainly from the past, are called up within Eugene when he stops in Baltimore to visit the hospital where, in his fatal illness, his father is being treated. The old man seems yellow, wan, and exhausted, and only the stonecutter’s hands, of a massive size and grace, seem still to suggest the strength and dignity with which he had once carried out his chosen calling; even appearing to have wasted away, and with only hints of his once vibrant spirit. Somewhat later dies in the midst of numerous relatives and friends who have come by during his last days.

Wolfe’s second novel is divided into parts bearing allegorical allusions; the figure most readily identified with his fictional hero is portrayed in the second section as “young Faustus.” Just as Goethe's Faust is noted for his striving for knowledge that marks him as the first modern man, Eugene Gant is propelled by an immense and boundless striving to read anything and everything he can and to encompass all known learning and literature in a self-imposed regimen that goes well beyond the limits of formal study. At Harvard’s library he prowls about in the stacks, taking down volumes he has not seen before and timing with a watch how many seconds it takes to finish one page and read the next before moving on. Eugene also walks the streets alone, mainly for the sake of gathering in sights and sounds that are still new and not entirely familiar to him. He marvels at the lonely, tragic beauty of New England, which he has come to believe differs from his native South.

Eugene, like Wolfe himself, for a time devotes unstinting energies to writing plays for a workshop which absorbs his energies, but later he turns away from these efforts as constraining and imposing limits upon his creative self. At times he expresses his disdain for productions that he thinks are overly fashionable or artistic. Wolfe often was given to expressing his hero’s observations and aspirations quantitatively, in large numbers, to suggest some great and unrealized vision of the nation and of human culture, in its immeasurable richness: While at Harvard, Eugene yearns to read one million books, to possess ten thousand women, and to know something about fifty million of the American people. Such strivings seem idealistic and elemental yearnings of and young man whose very being seems set upon not the satisfaction but the pursuit of his unending quest.

For a time, however, he must provide for himself by teaching college-level English courses in New York. All the while, the growing discontent fed by this routine breeds in him wants of another sort. Eugene yearns to travel and experience new vistas on several levels. One autumn he sets forth to see the great cities of the Old World.

In England, Eugene feels some affinity with a people who share with him a common language and literature. Though England seems drab and colorless in some ways, and the cuisine for the most part bland and disappointing, he ultimately senses a bond of affection which transcends any outward differences. On the other hand Eugene is moved by the atmosphere and attitudes which contrast with those of his own country. In France he feels overwhelmed by the Faustian urges that had beset him earlier; he wants to learn and read everything about Paris and its people. Not quite attracted or repelled, he becomes fascinated and at times awestruck by his surroundings.

Some episodes having less to do with cultural matters prove diverting and at times distressing. When he encounters a man he had known from his Harvard days and two American women, their brief camaraderie turns to bitterness and recrimination when Eugene, somewhat put out by what he regards as their affected Boston ways, becomes involved in a fight with his erstwhile friends. After some spirited quarrels, he leaves the others. Once out of Paris, he is befriended by some odd older women from noble families; in the end, as he has chronically been on the verge of exhausting his money altogether, his travels on the Continent must be brought to a close. Having traveled about at length, more and more he has become beset with a longing for home, and indeed he is eager for the sight of anything that might hint of America. When the journey of this modern Faust has been completed, he also—in a state of some wonderment—comes upon a woman for whom he has been longing, on the return voyage home.

"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals therof are coals of fire, which have a most behement flame." (p 922) ( )
  jwhenderson | Aug 31, 2018 |
373. Of Time and the River A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth, by Thomas Wolfe (read 5 Jul 1950) On June 19, 1950, I said: "Started tonight Of Time and the River. He (Wolfe) is thrilling and makes me groan in thrilling biteyness. What a style, what a thinker, what acuity of feeling. How he, Wolfe, must have lived. So vibrant, so keyed-up, so extraordinary, so different from any mood I have ever known existed. I doubt that I'd want such a terrific hungering drive as his Eugene Gant (he, of course) had. No one understood him anyhow, 'Tis a good time to read the book for me--since Gant is at the same position in his life as I am: about to embark for a new. far-from-home, University, He to Harvard, I to Georgetown." On June 20 I said: "Of Time and the River is beautifully, powerfully written, but jumbly. I think I can at least appreciate feelings people have about a lot of things, but some of his I can't conceive. He gets a certain feeling when he gets off a streetcar and it leaves. Cats, that's quite a wispy thing and not especially deserving of expression, I'd think. But for all that, 'tis weird and poignant." On June 21 I said: "Reading slowly in Of Time and the River--Why? It's only 10, and I'm going to bed." On June 22 I said: "Reading in Of Time and the River tonight but so sleepy I quit." On July 5 I said: "Finished Of Time and the River today; it had moments of real greatness. But I think I either read it too fast sometimes, or too uncomprehendingly or skimmingly. His prose is stupendous and if I reflected on it at times it'd almost knock me over. But the book drug - 900 pages without a plot--it was bound to. My opinion of Wolfe is down, but it may rise as my memory of the dullness fades, and I remember only the good parts about the book." ( )
  Schmerguls | Oct 22, 2013 |
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Epigraph
... of wandering forever and the earth again... of seed-time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest. And of the big flowers, the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.

Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide forever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be forever stilled.

Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever.

Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall speak no work through the rooted lips, the snake's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain, there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.

The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure forever. The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elmroot threads the bones of buried lovers.

The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouth crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure forever; hair grows life April on the buried breast and from the sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish.

O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness
Dedication
To Maxwell Evarts Perkins
A great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair, a work to known as "Of Time and the River" is dedicated with the hope that all of it may be in some way worthy of the loyal devotion and the patient care which a dauntless and unshaken friend has given to each part of it, and without which none of it could have been written.

"Crito, my dear friend Crito, that, believe me, that is what I seem to hear, as the Corybants hear flutes in the air, and the sound of those words rings and echoes in my ears and I can listen to nothing else."
First words
About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this century, four people were standing together on the platform of the railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba.
Quotations
October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow, and delight--and with October. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, an ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollenated haze in afternoon; but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost.... (Chap. 39)
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Disambiguation notice
This LT work is the complete work of Thomas Wolfe's "Of Time and the River." There are separate LT works for (a) Volume 1 only; and (b) Volume 2 only, containing parts 2 and 3 ("Young Faustus and Telemachus"). Please distinguish between parts and the whole; thank you.
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The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe.

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