Look Homeward, Angel

I'm Mr Lonely, Bobby Vinton
Of all the reading I've done, I am most remiss in not reading more of Tom Wolfe, considered by William Faulkner to be the greatest author of his generation; Faulkner listed himself as second.

From Wikipedia: 

Wolfe saw less than half of his work published in his lifetime, due to the amount of the material he left at his death. He was the first American writer to leave two complete, unpublished novels at death. Two further Wolfe novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, were published posthumously by Perkins, who was the literary executor of Wolfe's estate. They were editorially mined out of his October Fair manuscript by Edward Aswell of Harper and Row. The novels were "two of the longest one-volume novels (some 700 pages apiece) ever written." In these novels, Wolfe switched his autobiographical character from Eugene Gant to George Webber.

I think of Catcher in the Rye.  

More from Wikipedia:

He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. Bernstein, 18 years his senior, was married to a successful stock broker with whom she had two children. In October 1925, Wolfe and Bernstein became lovers and remained so for five years. Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she was a powerful influence encouraging and funding his writing. He returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of a novel, O Lost, which eventually evolved into Look Homeward, Angel ... When the novel was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929, Wolfe dedicated it to Bernstein.