There was a glory in the world: life was panting for his embrace' Eugene Gant, born in the shadow of the mountains to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and sensitive observer of American life, Eugene experiences upheaval and family tragedy before coming to realise that he must leave his home behind if he is to forge his own path. Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical first novel is a wild, epic chronicle of family, inheritance and identity, from one of the most vital and mercurial voices of early twentieth-century literature.
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).