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The Autobiographical Outline for Look Homeward, Angel By Thomas Wolfe Edited by Lucy Conniff and Richard S. Kennedy Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press (2004). xxvi +99 pp. ISBN 0807129410 (softcover), $18.95.
In the summer of 1926, Thomas Wolfe began work on an autobiographical novel. Frustrated by his failure to achieve success as a playwright, he was encouraged by Aline Bernstein to try writing fiction. From June through August 1926, while in Europe, Wolfe began recording his memories in notebooks, writing an outline of his life that he would flesh out into the novel that became Look Homeward, Angel. This autobiographical outline is more than a simple sketch; it is an unrelenting flood of memories. Wolfe mined his experiences-extracting people, phrases, images, sensory impressions-and jotted them all down without regard to punctuation or continuity. These long lists of recollections were clearly not compiled to be read by anyone other than Wolfe. And yet reading them now gives us an...