Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
Summary
Eugene Gant grows up in the fictional North Carolina mountain town of Altamont, a thin disguise for Wolfe's own hometown of Asheville, in a large, quarrelsome family running a boardinghouse under the shadow of his father Oliver Gant's drinking and his mother's tight fisted management of the family's money. Wolfe traces Eugene from early childhood through a local writing prize, a prep school education, and finally enrollment at the state university, mentored along the way by teachers, John Dorsey and Margaret Leonard among them, who see in him something his own family mostly fails to notice. The novel's emotional center arrives late, when Eugene's older brother Ben, the sibling who has actually looked after him, dies of pneumonia in a wrenching, drawn out sequence that stops the narrative's forward motion cold and forces the whole sprawling Gant family to sit inside a single loss together. In the aftermath, Eugene decides to leave Altamont for graduate study at Harvard, over his mother's open objections that he stay close to home, and the novel ends with him setting out, hungry for a wider world he has spent the entire book wanting and has only now earned the nerve to actually chase.
Wolfe writes in a torrential, pile driving style, one sensory detail stacked on the next until a single ordinary afternoon in the Gant house can run for pages, and that density is both the book's great pleasure and the thing that makes it a genuinely demanding read; readers who love it tend to love exactly the excess that readers who cannot get through it name as the problem. Wolfe's own autobiography sits so close to the surface of the novel that Asheville's real residents recognized themselves in its less flattering portraits almost immediately, and many never forgave him for it.
The angel of the title was a real object: Wolfe's father ran a monument shop that carved and sold tombstones, and had once kept an Italian marble angel statue at the shop to draw customers before selling it in 1906 to the Johnson family of nearby Hendersonville, where it still stands today in Oakdale Cemetery, the literal stone the novel's title points back to.
Historical Context & Significance
Wolfe's editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, pushed hard for cuts to the sprawling original manuscript, trimming roughly sixty thousand words before publication in September 1929, though Perkins himself later insisted the extent of that cutting has come to be greatly exaggerated in the retelling and that his real contribution was reorganizing the material rather than simply slashing it. The book was received as a sensation on arrival, and it came closer to a prize than most books on this list: the 1930 Pulitzer jury weighed Look Homeward, Angel and Mary Lee's It's a Great War alongside Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy before settling unanimously on Laughing Boy.
Wolfe never won a major prize for any of his novels before his death from a tuberculosis related brain infection in 1938, at thirty seven, just weeks short of his thirty eighth birthday. Ketti Frings's stage adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel opened on Broadway in November 1957 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1958, an honor that belongs to the play rather than to Wolfe's original novel, and the uncut manuscript Perkins had trimmed was finally published in full in 2000, under Wolfe's own original title, O Lost, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.