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Title: O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life by Thomas Wolfe, Arlyn Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli ISBN: 1-57003-369-2 Publisher: University of South Carolina Press Pub. Date: October, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting, but not revolutionary
Comment: Look Homeward Angel has for decades been a standard coming of age book read devotedly by people in their late teens and early twenties. Over the years, stories developed concerning the amount of cutting that editor Maxwell Perkins (who also edited Hemingway and Fitzgerald) did on the book. The accepted wisdom was that Perkins pulled a masterpiece out of a huge, unpublishable manuscript. This edition, which is based on Wolfe's orginial manuscript and uses his chosen title, shows that while Perkins did help to shape the book, the text that he began with was not the monstrosity it was later believed to be. Some of the cuts Perkins made, such as W.O. Gant's memories of Gettysburg, would appear in Of Time and the River, and Perkins later admitted that he was wrong to cut it. Other material that one reads for the first time seems less important. Overall, I did not find the book to be that different from Look Homeward Angel. It shows both Wolfe's strengts and weaknesses, his abiliy to create Whitmanesque passages, and to engage in self-indulgent prose. I agree with the other reviewers that it is unfortunate that this book so quickly was allowed to go out of print. Whichever version you read, this is a book best read before you are 30.
Rating: 5
Summary: Finally, the lost is found
Comment: I first re read Look Homeward Angel,( which I had not read for almost 50 years) then O Lost. I think that the original manuscript is far superior to the edited version, that was originally published. Certainly the introduction is excellant and sets the stage for W.O.Gant's odessey. Admittedly, some editing would be helpful, to make a smoother transition from one chapter to another, but only minor ones, not the radical surgery that was actually done.
I think that Wolfe realized this, and that was why he changed publishers. I look forward to the unedited manuscripts of the Web and the Rock, and You can't go home again.
My only problem is that during the period when I first read these novels, I have had medical and particularly psychiatric training. It is obvious that W.O. suffered from severe bipolar or manic depressive psychosis. With modern treatment, he would have been a happier man, or at least those around him would have had better lives. But then perhaps Thomas Wolfe would not have been the writer that he was to become.
Rating: 5
Summary: Time regained
Comment: What a wonderful book. It's too bad so many readers today know only Tom Wolfe, not Thomas Wolfe. Even though it has been at least 10 years since reading Look Homewood Angel, I knew almost immediately when I came to the new sections. They add a depth to the novel, bringing in the whole town and relatives, rather being only about Eugene Gant. My favorite Wolfe readings involve trains; the experience about time stopping for a moment when you look into the eyes of someone looking directly at you into the train, is exactly as I remember my earlier train rides.What are they doing now, that the train has passed? Other 800 page books might be dull, but not this one. Having been given it as a present recently, I am very surprised and disappointed that it is already 'out of print." More people should know about O Lost!
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Title: LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0684804433 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Hills Beyond by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0807125679 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0060930055 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Web and the Rock (Voices of the South) by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0807123897 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.02 |
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Title: Of Time and the River : A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0684867850 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 08 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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