You Can't Go Home Again

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Harper Collins, Aug 5, 1998 - Fiction - 711 pages
George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town he is shaken by the force of the outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and friends feel naked and exposed by the truths they have seen in his book, and their fury drives him from his home. He begins a search for his own identity that takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. At last Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow, and hope.

"If there stills lingers and doubt as to Wolfe's right to a place among the immortals of American letters, this work should dispel it."
--Cleveland News

"Wolfe wrote as one inspired. No one of his generation had his command of language, his passion, his energy."
--The New Yorker

"You Can't Go Home Again 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 has something profoundly important to say."
--New York Times Book Review

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About the author (1998)

Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina on October 3, 1900. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. He taught at New York University from 1924 to 1930. His four long autobiographical novels are Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; The Web and the Rock; and You Can't Go Home Again. He also wrote short stories that were collected in The Hills Beyond and From Death to Morning. He wrote several plays including Welcome to Our City. From an early bout with pneumonia, he suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs, which led to fatal tuberculosis of the brain. He died following brain surgery on September 15, 1938 at age 37.

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