Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
List: $39.95 | Sale: $27.97
Club: $19.97

Look Homeward, Angel
A Story of the Buried Life

Author: Thomas Wolfe, Stefan Rudnicki

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Unabridged: 25 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/18/2025


Synopsis

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is at once a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and a dark novel depicting a cynical post-war world view. The book follows the life of Eugene Gant, a young man driven by passion, intellect, and a search for something greater than himself. His earliest years in rural North Carolina include a wonderful education in poetry and literature against the backdrop of a loving, but tumultuous family life. Eugene grows up to be a writer, and as he navigates the realities of school, love, health, and what it means to discover your place in the world, he must reconcile the choice between family and self-actualization.Wolfe once described Look Homeward, Angel as “a book made out of my life,” and the care and insight he uses to tell Eugene’s story are apparent from the very first words of the story. Wolfe’s novel has become influential to so many young people yearning for more, and to writers yearning for literary truth and beauty. Featuring an introduction written and read by Stefan Rudnicki.

About Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was one of the most influential American novelists of the early twentieth century. His works have inspired countless modern authors including Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth. Wolfe is best known for his lyrical prose and for being a master of autobiographical fiction. Although he is best known for Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe wrote four novels, and many more short stories, dramas, and novellas. 

About Stefan Rudnicki

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on August 31, 2024

Even angels must leave their nests in heaven one day… …a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable an......more

Goodreads review by Bam cooks the books on June 14, 2017

While visiting Asheville, NC, in May, we boarded a trolley at the Visitor's Center for a guided tour of the city. 'Uncle Ted' was our driver, a retired high school history teacher with a great sense of humor but an occasionally hard-to-decipher accent. He took umbrage if we didn't always laugh at hi......more

Goodreads review by Lawyer on July 31, 2014

Look Homeward, Angel, A Story of Buried Life: Or, Why I Can't Go Home Again Look Homeward, Angel, First Edition, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, NY, 1929 The manuscript Thomas Wolfe submitted to master editor Maxwell Perkins was not titled Look Homeward, Angel, A Story of Buried Life. Rather, Wolfe h......more

Goodreads review by Michael on June 17, 2022

Mind-blowing, truly mind-blowing. This book seems to have nearly been forgotten now, but it had an absolutely earth-shattering impact on writers of the early 20th century following its publication in 1929. How it could possibly have lost the 1930 Pulitzer to the awful, condescending Laughing Boy: A......more


Quotes

“Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished.” Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain

“Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page.”  William Gay, author of The Long Home

“In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero’s loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence—for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn’t yearn for that?” Philip Roth, author of American Pastoral