The Fruit of Forty Thousand Years (Thomas Wolfe Student Essay Prize in Honor of Richard S. Kennedy, 2010) (Critical Essay)
Thomas Wolfe Review 2010, Annual, 34
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Publisher Description
Look Homeward, Angel, the first novel by North Carolina author Thomas Wolfe, saw publication in 1929 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Many hailed it for its elegant prose, vivid imagery, and moving characters. Walter Adams, in the Asheville Times, called Look Homeward, Angel "an outstanding novel possessed of unquestioned literary merit." He added, "The portrait is vivid, the style is incisive, the narrative flows with a freedom that sweeps along the most resisting reader" (2). Margaret Wallace wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "It is a book of great drive and vigor, of profound originality, of rich and variant color" (8). Richard Young of the Charlotte News predicted of Wolfe: "... the nation will doubtless hail him as one of our greatest contemporary writers" (15). However, Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel also had their share of detractors. The most frequent of the criticisms leveled at the novel regarded Wolfe's story as formless and indulgent. Thomas Shaw Jr. of Archive remarked that Wolfe "is confronted with a jumbled pile of memories and emotions. Afraid to cast off even one stone from that pile lest he omit a part of the truth, he ends by giving the whole enmasse" [sic] (25). Geoffrey Hellman of the New Republic, while not himself denouncing the book (calling it an "extraordinarily fine novel"), cited negative response that he attributed to "its style and its lack of structural form" (16). A particularly harsh review by Edwin Fairley of the Christian Register questioned why Look Homeward, Angel was published at all, stating that "Even the similes in this foul book are vile," Wolfe's "vocabulary is beyond [understanding]," and "One disgusting situation follows another until we are nauseated." Fairley believed that rather than publishing the novel, Scribner's "ought to have burned it" (19).