and the earth did not devour him summary

#And the earth did not devour him summary windows

Suddenly, through the open windows at the front of the house came the raucous splutter of a truck starting up at the loading platform of the warehouse across the street. All the noises of the city were muted here into a distant hum, so unceasing that it seemed to belong to silence. In the rest of the block half a dozen old brick houses, squeezed together in a solid row, leaned wearily against each other and showed their backsides to him. This side of the hospital, and directly opposite, was the lower structure of the annex, where the nurses and the waitresses lived. His eye took in the towering mass of the new hospital at the end of the block, its upper floors set back in terraces, the soaring walls salmon colored in the evening light. It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York. back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.” Excerpt away from all the strife and conflict of the world. He is a changed man yet a hopeful one, awake to the knowledge that one can never fully “go back home to your family, back home to your childhood.

He discovers a world plagued by political uncertainty and on the brink of transformation, yet he finds within himself the capacity to meet it with optimism and a renewed love for his birthplace. Unsettled by their reaction and unsure of himself and his future, Webber begins a search for a greater understanding of his artistic identity that takes him deep into New York’s hectic social whirl to London with an uninhibited group of expatriates and to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler’s shadow.

When his first novel is published, it brings him the fame he has sought, but it also brings the censure of his neighbors back home, who are outraged by his depiction of them. Upon the publication of You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940, two years after Wolfe’s death, The New York Times Book Review declared that it “will stand apart from everything else that he wrote because this is the book of a man who had come to terms with himself, who was on his way to mastery of his art, who had something profoundly important to say.”ĭriven by dreams of literary success, George Webber has left his provincial hometown to make his name as a writer in New York City. Now available from Thomas Wolfe’s original publisher, the final novel by the literary legend, that “will stand apart from everything else that he wrote” ( The New York Times Book Review)-first published in 1940 and long considered a classic of twentieth century literature.Ī twentieth-century classic, Thomas Wolfe’s magnificent novel is both the story of a young writer longing to make his mark upon the world and a sweeping portrait of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the years leading up to World War II.

And the earth did not devour him summary