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In Praise of "Forward-Looking Men": Thomas Wolfe's Rejection of Pastoral in "The Hills Beyond"

In Praise of "Forward-Looking Men": Thomas Wolfe's Rejection of Pastoral in "The Hills Beyond" FEATURED AUTHOR IN PRAISE OF "FORWARD-LOOKING MEN": THOMAS WOLFE'S REJECTION OF PASTORAL IN "THE HILLS BEYOND" George Hovis One of the most common of commonplaces about Thomas Wolfe is that he was a man torn between his rural and small-town roots and the shining cities that called to him and in which he spent his adulthood. "The Hills Beyond," the unfinished novel on which Wolfe was working at the time of his death, has often been read in light of Wolfe's rural/urban conflict, and typically it has been used to argue that in his final years, Wolfe was moving away from, even renouncing, his involvement with the metropolis and moving toward a much closer identification with his rural roots and with the family of his mother. In The Weather ofHis Youth, Louis Rubin sums up Wolfe's two-decadelong relationship with the metropolis by saying that he "left Asheville for 'new lands and mornings and the shining city,' glad to be free of the humdrum monotony of provincial life. But he found the city ultimately barren, and in his last novel [You Can't Go Home Again] he symbolically destroyed it" (114). Further, Rubin remarks that Wolfe "is of the Carolina http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Appalachian Review University of North Carolina Press

In Praise of "Forward-Looking Men": Thomas Wolfe's Rejection of Pastoral in "The Hills Beyond"

Hovis, George.
Appalachian Review , Volume 35 (4) – Jan 8, 2007
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Berea College
ISSN
1940-5081
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Abstract

FEATURED AUTHOR IN PRAISE OF "FORWARD-LOOKING MEN": THOMAS WOLFE'S REJECTION OF PASTORAL IN "THE HILLS BEYOND" George Hovis One of the most common of commonplaces about Thomas Wolfe is that he was a man torn between his rural and small-town roots and the shining cities that called to him and in which he spent his adulthood. "The Hills Beyond," the unfinished novel on which Wolfe was working at the time of his death, has often been read in light of Wolfe's rural/urban conflict, and typically it has been used to argue that in his final years, Wolfe was moving away from, even renouncing, his involvement with the metropolis and moving toward a much closer identification with his rural roots and with the family of his mother. In The Weather ofHis Youth, Louis Rubin sums up Wolfe's two-decadelong relationship with the metropolis by saying that he "left Asheville for 'new lands and mornings and the shining city,' glad to be free of the humdrum monotony of provincial life. But he found the city ultimately barren, and in his last novel [You Can't Go Home Again] he symbolically destroyed it" (114). Further, Rubin remarks that Wolfe "is of the Carolina

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Appalachian Review – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 8, 2007

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