Of Time and the River. Thomas Wolfe's sweeping sequel to Look Homeward, Angel

He wanted to devour the whole world-every book, every city, every stranger's story-and Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel big enough to hold that hunger. Continuing where Look Homeward, Angel left off, Of Time and the River follows young Eugene Gant from small-town North Carolina to Harvard, New York, and Europe, chasing an ambition he can barely name and can't stop chasing. Wolfe's prose is torrential-long, breathless, cataloguing sensation after sensation as Eugene falls in and out of love, in and out of certainty, always reaching for something just past his grasp.
It's less a plot than a flood, and it swept 1930s readers away. Sprawling, uneven, and unmistakably alive, this is autobiographical fiction at its most unguarded. Why does it still resonate? Because everyone who's ever wanted more out of life than life seemed willing to give recognizes Eugene's restlessness.