The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Dec. 9, 1957

Look Homeward, Angel (adapted from Thomas Wolfe's novel by Ketti Frings). Few novels of any size or importance can be transferred to the stage without forfeiting an amplitude that is half their strength, a personal accent that is half their essence. Look Homeward, Angel is one of the few, and the reason is clear enough: the novel's amplitude is often the sheerest excess, its personal accent the most rioting rhetoric. For all Wolfe's great gifts, his novel was too often diminished by a craving for size, impoverished by an orgy of word-spending, made...

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