Böcker av Thomas Wolfe

The first novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film, Genius, starring Jude Law, Colin Firth, Dominic West and Nicole Kidman. Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler 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 in the world. This is the dazzlingly rich first novel from one of the most brilliant and mercurial voices of early twentieth-century, who was a major influence on writers including Hunter S. Thompson, Ray Bradbury, Philip Roth and the Beats.This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian. Wolfe's second novel, Of Time and the River, continuing the story of Eugene Gant, is also now available in Penguin Classics.

A young Eugene Gant wrestles free from the suffocating grip of Altamont, a fictional North Carolina town, in this stirring journey of self-discovery. A sprawling debut novel by Thomas Wolfe, this profound coming-of-age narrative echoes the author's experiences. A true American classic that continues to resonate with readers today.

Este es un primer libro, y en él ha escrito el autor sobre experiencias ahora lejanas y perdidas, pero que antaño fueron parte del tejido de su vida. Por consiguiente, si algún lector dijera que el libro es «autobiográfico», el autor no podría contestarle; a su entender; toda obra seria de ficción es autobiográfica, y así, por ejemplo, no es fácil imaginar una obra más autobiográfica que Los viajes de Gulliver. Sin embargo, esta nota va principalmente dirigida a las personas a quienes pudo conocer el autor en el periodo abarcado por estas páginas. A esas personas les diría algo que cree que comprenden ya: que este libro fue escrito con espíritu cándido y desnudo, y que el principal empeño del autor fue dar la plenitud, vida e intensidad a las acciones y a los personajes del libro que creaba. Ahora que este va a publicarse, quisiera insistir en que es un libro de ficción, en el que no pretendió retratar a nadie. Pero nosotros somos la suma de todos los momentos de nuestras vidas; todo lo nuestro está en ellos: no podemos eludirlo ni ocultarlo. Si el escritor ha empleado la arcilla de la vida para crear su libro, no ha hecho más que emplear lo que todos los hombres deben usar, lo que nadie puede dejar de usar. Ficción no es realidad, pero la ficción es una realidad seleccionada y asimilada, la ficción es una realidad ordenada y provista de un designio. El doctor Johnson observó que un hombre debería revolver media biblioteca para escribir un solo libro; de la misma manera, el novelista puede tener que estudiar a la mitad de la gente de una ciudad para crear un solo personaje de su novela. Esto no es todo el método, pero cree el autor que ilustra todo el método en un libro escrito desde media distancia y sin rencor ni mala intención.

Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He became widely known during his own lifetime.This is a large collection of Wolfe's novels and short stories--his best and most characteristic work all in one volume. It has selections from "Look Homeward, Angel", "Of Time and the River" and a lot more.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) war ein amerikanischer Schriftsteller. In dem expressionistischen Dichter Hans Schiebelhuth fand er für seine ersten beiden Romane einen kongenialen Übersetzer, der dazu beitrug, dass Wolfe sich zeitweise in Deutschland höher geschätzt fühlte als in seiner Heimat. In Amerika gehörte William Faulkner, in Deutschland Hermann Hesse zu seinen Bewunderern. Inhalt: • Keine Tür • Tod, der stolze Bruder • Am Rande des Krieges • Nur die Toten kennen Brooklyn • Dunkel im Walde, fremd wie die Zeit • Die vier verlornen Männer • Gulliver • Landstreicher um Sonnenuntergang • Ein Mädchen aus unsrer Reisegesellschaft • Ferne und Nähe • Im Park • Die Leute von Alt-Catawba • Zirkus im Tagesgrauen • Das Geweb aus Erde

Von Zeit und Strom ist der zweiter Roman des amerikanischen Autors Thomas Wolfe. Es ist eine fiktive Autobiographie und gehört zu den bemerkenswertesten Zeugnissen amerikanischer Erzählkunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) war ein amerikanischer Schriftsteller. In dem expressionistischen Dichter Hans Schiebelhuth fand er für seine ersten beiden Romane einen kongenialen Übersetzer, der dazu beitrug, dass Wolfe sich zeitweise in Deutschland höher geschätzt fühlte als in seiner Heimat. In Amerika gehörte William Faulkner, in Deutschland Hermann Hesse zu seinen Bewunderern. Aus dem Buch: "Immens und plötzlich und mit der abrupten Nahheit, der teleskopischen Magie, mit der sich Dinge im Traum ereignen, erschien der englische Dampfer an der Küste Frankreichs; er kam näher und ragte auf mit der eigenartigen Unvermitteltheit, mit der mächtige, riesenhafte Gegenstände, die sich mit großer Geschwindigkeit fortbewegen, näher kommen und aufragen; man hatte nicht das Erlebnis der Anlaufbewegung, des allmählichen, zunehmenden Größerwerdens, es war vielmehr so, daß das Bild des Dampfers von einer Größe übergangslos in eine andre verschmolz, so, wie manchmal im Kino die Gesichter der Menschen auf der Leinwand aus der Normalgröße in einer Kette von schnellen Überblendungen in Großaufnahme übermächtig eindrucksvoll vor den Zuschauer gebracht werden, ruckweise, schußweise, so, wie der Geist aus der entstöpselten Zauberflasche im Märchen."

The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories and novellas takes its title is credited as Wolfe's final effort. It tells the story of the Joyner family and conveys Wolfe's fine sense of family traits, rooted in a traceable past.

In 1920 Thomas Wolfe left the South with the strong desire to become a dramatist. To pursue his chosen craft, he enrolled in the Harvard 47 Workshop, at that time the most renowned in the nation. At first he wrote plays about Appalachian society and the Civil War. But it was not until Wolfe turned to the modern South--inspired by a disturbing return to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina--that his genius awoke. There he found the material he would work into the best of his three full-length plays written at Harvard, the material that in the next decade would be recast into the novels that would make him famous. This is the first book publication of Welcome to Our City, Thomas Wolfe's play in ten scenes of a modern South ruled by liars and real estate agents, overrun with boosterism, and dedicated to greed. This sprawling, fiery work has lain dormant among Wolfe's papers for over fifty years, abandoned by its author after an unsuccessful attempt to revise and shorten it for a New York Theatre Guild production. For this edition, Richard S. Kennedy has reassembled a full performance text of the workshop version presented at Harvard in 1923--a production that involved forty-five cast members, including over thirty speaking parts, required seven stage changes, and lasted over three and a half hours in performance. The action of Welcome to Our City centers on a scheme of the town fathers and real estate promoters of Altamont, a small southern city, to snatch up all the property in a centrally located black district, evict the tenants, tear down their houses and shops, and build a new white residential section in its place. When the blacks, under the angry leadership of a strong-willed doctor, resist eviction, a race riot breaks out--shattering both the precarious social balance of the city and the "progressive" dreams of Altamont's boosters. Building on this plot, Wolfe guides his audience through the back rooms, stately homes, ans shanty towns of Altamont, contrasting tradition-bound southern characters with a new breed of life drawn from the vast menagerie of 1920s Main Street America: fact-spouting yes-men, hypocritical religious leaders, anti-intellectual professors, provincial country club matrons, and politicians inauthentic from their heads to their feet. Welcome to Our City is not merely an exhibit in the artistic development of a future novelist. Wolfe used the dramatic form inventively and with considerable inspiration to expose the culture of greed that he saw spreading around him and to caricature the men who, he feared, would usher in an age of mediocrity across America. Emotionally gripping and mockingly satiric, Welcome to Our City captures the festering social climate of the 1920s in a vision of life that is uncomfortably relevant to our own times.

The second novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film, Genius, starring Jude Law, Colin Firth, Dominic West and Nicole Kidman.It is 1920 and Eugene Gant leaves the American South for Harvard, New York and Europe, determined to make his way as a writer. On the boat home, he meets Esther Jack, the woman who is to dominate his life. Autobiographical, vital and passionate, Wolfe's second novel blazes with energy and life.Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is also now available in Penguin Classics. Together, the two novels tell the story of Eugene Gant, Wolfe's fictional alter-ego, as he grows up in a dysfunctional family in the American South and discovers his true vocation as a writer.This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian.