Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen

"In this ecocritical study of Thomas Wolfe's body of fiction, Robert Taylor Ensign explores how the celebrated writer's storytelling is founded on his dramatization - and apprehension - of the natural world's integral presence in human lives. According to Ensign, Wolfe, as ecoconscious as any American nature writer, conveyed a more emotionally vital natural world than did his contemporaries of the 1920s and 1930s.

Ensign traces the engagement of Wolfe's characters with the nonhuman world to roots in a romantic tradition of American literature, as exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne."--BOOK JACKET.