Perhaps they occasionally evoke a memory and a smile, but remove the natural closeness that proximity creates and you find that having once shared a few high school classes is not enough to sustain a lifelong relationship. Best friends are still close, but the peripheral relationships - the ones whose only ties were geography and circumstance - have faded away.Ĭommon interests, shared experiences and momentum are the things that bind superficial relationships take away those ties, and most of those associations evaporate.

Like towns, the people we thought of when we thought of home change, too. To them, home has remained home and maybe even got a little better. They are not nostalgic like I am, because the changes they see happening, happened with purpose. When roads are widened, they see easier commutes rather than the destruction caused by the new concrete. To them, a new mega-grocery store is more vital than the forest it replaced. What I see as destruction, I know many people who remained there regard as an improvement.

back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.That’s not how everyone looks at it.

away from all the strife and conflict of the world. He is a changed man yet a hopeful one, awake to the knowledge that one can never fully 'go back home to your family, back home to your childhood. He discovers a world plagued by political uncertainty and on the brink of transformation, yet he finds within himself the capacity to meet it with optimism and a renewed love for his birthplace. Unsettled by their reaction and unsure of himself and his future, Webber begins a search for a greater understanding of his artistic identity that takes him deep into New York's hectic social whirl to London with an uninhibited group of expatriates and to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. When his first novel is published, it brings him the fame he has sought, but it also brings the censure of his neighbors back home, who are outraged by his depiction of them. Upon the publication of 'You Can't Go Home Again 'in 1940, two years after Wolfe's death, 'The New York Times Book Review 'declared that it '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 was on his way to mastery of his art, who had something profoundly important to say.'ĭriven by dreams of literary success, George Webber has left his provincial hometown to make his name as a writer in New York City. A twentieth-century classic, Thomas Wolfe's magnificent novel is both the story of a young writer longing to make his mark upon the world and a sweeping portrait of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the years leading up to World War II.

You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe