Thomas Wolfe

I've taken to re-reading books I read decades ago in college, and Look Homeward Angel is one of them. This man writes like an angel himself, with all that sweeping loquaciousness of the Southern writer (and the unfortunate early 20th century racial attitudes of the South), that alcohol fueled self conscious geniusness that's wet with emotion and deep mystery and beautiful scriptural profundity. Sentences that roll down the page like great rivers of human pain and delirium and joy. And honestly, the climactic scene of the brother's death had me sobbing out loud, and no book has done that to me in, well, decades. A really gorgeous and somewhat forgotten book. But Wolfe's day will come again.