#Thomas Wolfe

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, August 12, 1936.

[Edgar Lee] Masters proclaimed in his booming courthouse voice that there was no better home for a writer than the Hotel Chelsea. He urged [Thomas] Wolfe to sign the register and stood by as the younger man grasped the pen, observing with satisfaction Wolfe’s receding hairline and slightly drooping jowls. Wunderkind or not, the author of Look Homeward, Angel needed spectacles to read. But Masters meant what he’d said about the Chelsea. Granted, it lacked the polish of the Algonquin, with its fabled Round Table wits and bow-tied maître d’. The Chelsea had had a run of bad luck ... Still, for people with small bank accounts but big imaginations, a unique and intriguing spirit lingered in the atmosphere. Like a stately ocean liner, the enormous Victorian-era residence had withstood the battering of the district’s successive waves of vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons, oyster houses and seamen’s bars, office buildings and warehouse lofts. Inside the Chelsea, a tradition of tolerance, built into its bones, had allowed its occupants to weather these changes with equanimity. 

    --Sherill Tippins, Inside the Dream Palace: The Life & Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013)

Photo: Berenice Abbott via Jackson Fine Art

[a-girl-and-her-quotes]

Thomas Wolfe - Look Homeward, Angel

[razorsadness]

Tuesday June 21, 1938 (Yosemite)

Dies Irae: Wakened at 5:30—dragged weary bones erect, dressed, closed baggage, was ready shortly before six, and we were off again "on the dot"—at six oclock. So out of Klamath, the lakes red, and a thread of silver river in the desert, and immediately

the desert, sage brush, and bare, naked, hills, giant-molded, craterous, cupreous, glaciated blasted—a demonic heath with reaches of great pine, and volcanic glaciation, cupreous, fiendish, desert, blasted—the ruins of old settlers homesteads, ghost towns and the bleak little facades of long forgotten postoffices lit bawdily by blazing rising sun and the winding mainstreet, the deserted station of the incessant railway—all dominated now by the glittering snow—pale masses of

Mount Shasta—pine lands, canyons, sweeps and rises, the naked crateric hills and the volcanic

lava masses and then Mount Shasta omnipresent—Mount Shasta all the time—always Mt. Shasta—and at last the town named Weed (with a divine felicity)—and breakfast at Weed at 7:45—and the morning bus from Portland and the tired people tumbling out and in for breakfast

and away from Weed and towering Shasta at 8:15—and up and climbing and at length into the passes of the lovely timbered Siskiyous and now down into canyon of the Sacramento in among the lovely timbered Siskiyous and all through the morning down and down and down the canyon, and the road snaking, snaking always with a thousand little punctual gashes, and the freight trains and the engines turned backward with the cabs in front

down below along the lovely Sacramento snaking snaking snaking—and at last into the town of Redding and the timber fading, hills fading, cupreous lavic masses fading—and almost at once the mighty valley of the Sacramento—as broad as a continent—and all through the morning through the great floor of that great plain

like valley—the vast fields thick with straw grass lighter

than Swedes hair—and infinitely far and unapproachable the towns down the mountain on both sides—and great herds of fat brown steers in straw light fields—a dry land, with a strange hot heady fragrance and fertility—and at last no mountains at all but the great sun-bright, heat-hazed, straw-light plain and the straight marvel of the road on which the car rushes

—Thomas Wolfe, from A Western Journal

[barnabascollins]

on houses and haunting, on homes and tombs, on leaving and going back

tracy k. smith, ash // dark shadows, episode 220 // thomas wolfe, you can’t go home again // 280 // wolfe // 239 // death cab, gold rush // smith // 430 // smith // history, tombs // 212 // wolfe // 212 // tumblr // 212 // the haunting of hill house // wolfe // 319 // smith // wolfe // 212 // wolfe // smith // 440 // maya angelou

[turbulent-talkbox]

Next Winter

September 22, 2024

Sourced from Thomas Wolfe's Letters To His Mother (1943)

Text under the cut

"I want you to know that I wish I could be enjoying some fine spring with you. I know how much you enjoy spring and good weather.

I am having dinner tonight

Spending another winter alone.

Visit me if you feel like it.

And by next winter I will winter with you.

If you ever need anything I earnestly request you to let me know instantly.

I am happy to have someone to look after.

I can be where you are"

[decadent-hag]

He was twenty-eight years old now, and wise enough to know that there are sometimes reasons of which the reason knows nothing, and that the emotional pattern of one's life, formed and set by years of living, is not to be discarded quite as easily as one may throw away a battered hat or a worn-out shoe. Well, he was not the first man to be caught on the horns of this dilemma. Had not even the philosophers themselves been similarly caught? Yes—and then written sage words about it: "A foolish consistency," Emerson had said, "is the hobgoblin of little minds." And great Goethe, accepting the inevitable truth that human growth does not proceed in a straight line to its goal, had compared the development and progress of mankind to the reelings of a drunken beggar on horseback. What was important, perhaps, was not that the beggar was drunk and reeling, but that he was mounted on his horse, and, however unsteadily, was going somewhere.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

[litafficionado]

-from Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

[biryudumbenden]

Bazen durup dururken şöyle olur, hayatın içindeki bütün bu düzensizlik büyük bir düzenin parçasıymış gibi gelir. Aydınlanma gibi bir şey olur, bilirsiniz. Gülümsetir, Wolfe bizden çok önce gülümsemiştir: "Tanrım, her şey olması gerektiği gibi, her şeyin böyle olması gerektiğini anladım. Tanrım! Ulu Tanrım! Tüm bu düzen, ne kadar da tuhaf ama bir yandan da basit, vahşi, tatlı, acımasız, hoş, korkunç, gizemli. Tüm bu düzen ne kadar da mutlak ve tanıdık."

Daima dupduru geçmiyor günler sevgili okur. Bazen de bulut var, dağılacak, her şeye rağmen bir ömür bu, yaşanılacak. Var olun.

[thepersonalwords]

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

Thomas Wolfe

[cuy-i-ruh]

Evine dönemezsin...

[amrv-5]

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Anthony Perkins in "Look Homeward, Angel," which played at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from November 28, 1957 to March 7, 1959, and then moved to the 54th Street Theatre from March 9 to April 4, 1959. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1958 for playwright Ketti Frings, based on the novel by Thomas Wolfe.

Photo: Friedman-Abeles via NYPL

[a-girl-and-her-quotes]

Thomas Wolfe - Look Homeward, Angel

[razorsadness]

Young, and Drunk, and Twenty

Immortal drunkenness! What tribute can we ever pay, what song can we ever sing, what swelling praise can ever be sufficient to express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love which we, who have known youth and hunger in America, have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken in America: immense and savage skies bend over us, and we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness, came to us in our youth when all our hearts were sick with hopelessness, our spirits maddened with unknown terrors, and our heads bowed down with nameless shame. You came to us victoriously, to possess us, and to fill our lives with your wild music, to make the goat-cry burst from our exultant throats, to make us know that here upon the wilderness, the savage land, that here beneath immense, inhuman skies of time, in all the desolation of the cities, the gray unceasing flood-tides of the manswarm, our youth would soar to fortune, fame and love, our spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry, our work go on triumphantly to fulfillment until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter then if since that time of your first coming, magic drunkenness, our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy, and if our flesh has lain battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy when we were twenty, when we reeled home at night through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston and heard our friend, our comrade, and our dead companion, shout through the silence of the moonwhite square: "You are a poet and the world is yours."

And victory, joy, wild hope, and swelling certitude and tenderness surged through the conduits of our blood as we heard that drunken cry, and triumph, glory, proud belief was resting like a chrysm around us as we heard that cry, and turned our eyes then to the moon-drunk skies of Boston, knowing only that we were young, and drunk, and twenty, and that the power of mighty poetry was within us, and the glory of the great earth lay before us—because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die!

—Thomas Wolfe, from Of Time and the River (illustrations by Edward Shenton, from The Face of a Nation)

[trailofleaves]

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." — Thomas Wolfe

[officialurban]

The Complete Masters Mahan Podcast

Something very strange is going on. People from all walks of life and from every corner of the world feel it. Something is wrong! Those with faith in Biblical prophecy suffer less with the problem as they look to the Bible and their faith for grounding, but even they have questions. They feel it too. We all do: Something is wrong! It is the intention of this short podcast to enter into the darker side of human history with the hope that it might be “a guidebook” to what is happening now and to what has happened to get us here. We can’t promise that it won’t be blunt, disturbing, and world shattering, but we can promise that it will be the truth; at least as much of the truth that can be gleaned from the maze of lies meant to disguise it. When you do feel like your foundation is made of sand, remember the words of Jesus Christ when He said: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” ~ Thomas Wolfe (The Author & Narrator)

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