Of Time and the River: Young Faustus, Telemachus

1965

Central YL WoIYo H

New York: Scribner

In his autobiographical novel Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe relates the life story of Eugene Gant, who leaves his home town in North Carolina, attends Harvard University, teaches English in New York, and travels in Europe. Wolfe’s fictional self meditates on time and the creative process. He believes that the artist is motivated by an ‘intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man’s living, a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes.’