Roger Pulvers

So it goes all the way to Australia.

Oh, shit.

On my bookshelf are many, many books that I read when I was younger, and the one that I was most passionate about and still am, the writer, is Thomas Wolfe, who was born in 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, and died in 1938 of tuberculosis.

And to my mind, was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.

When Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said that Woolf, had he lived, would have gotten it and should have gotten it.

And Fitzgerald loved Woolf's work.

Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, was in an institution in Asheville, North Carolina, where Woolf was from.

And Fitzgerald donated Woolf's books to the library.

And for me, growing up and being a teenager, and I was in Los Angeles, so I was very far from the South,

But he answered all of the questions for me of what my childhood was like, even though it was very different from his.

And we both were sort of from outside places, vis-à-vis the East and the Northeast.

And he went to Harvard when he was 19 and I went when I was 20.

But his greatest novel is his first, Look Homeward Angel, which he wrote in 1929 and became an instant bestseller in the United States and throughout Europe as well.

The Germans absolutely loved Wolf.

Wolf is very much like the American James Joyce.

For lack of a better term, it's sort of stream of consciousness, but much more narrative-oriented stream of consciousness than what we think of it.

In fact, Wolf met James Joyce three times and admired him very much.

Yes.

Yes, I did.

Well, I didn't read much Russian literature when I was a teenager because Russia was so far away.