Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

First published: 1929

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of plot: 1900 to early 1920s

Locale: North Carolina

Principal Characters

• Eugene Gant, a shy boy
• Eliza Gant, his mother
• Oliver Gant, his father
• Ben Gant, his brother
• Margaret Leonard, his teacher
• Laura James, his first sweetheart

The Story

Eugene, the youngest child in the Gant family, comes into the world when his mother, Eliza Gant, is forty-two years old. His father, Oliver Gant, goes on periodic drinking sprees to forget his unfulfilled ambitions and the unsatisfied wanderlust that has brought him to Altamont, in the hills of Old Catawba. When Eugene is born, his father is asleep in a drunken stupor.

Eliza disapproves of her husband’s debauches, but she lacks the imagination to understand their cause. Oliver, who was raised amid the plenty of a Pennsylvania farm, has no comprehension of the privation and suffering that existed in the South after the Civil War, the cause of the hoarding and acquisitiveness of his wife and her Pentland relations in the Old Catawba hill country.

Eliza bears the burden of Oliver’s drinking and promiscuity until Eugene is four years old; then she departs for St. Louis, taking all the children with her except for the oldest daughter, Daisy. It is 1904, the year of the great St. Louis World’s Fair, and Eliza intends to open a boardinghouse for her visiting fellow townspeople. The idea is abhorrent to Oliver, and he stays in Altamont. Eliza’s sojourn in St. Louis ends abruptly when twelve-year-old Grover falls ill with typhoid and dies. Stunned, she gathers her remaining children and goes home.

Young Eugene is a shy, awkward boy with dark, brooding eyes. He is, like his ranting, histrionic father, a dreamer. He is not popular with his schoolmates, who sense instinctively that he is different and make him pay the price; at home, he is the victim of his sisters’ and brothers’ taunts and torments. His one champion is his brother Ben, though even Ben has been conditioned by the Gants’ unemotional family life to give his caresses as cuffs.

There is little time, however, for Eugene’s childish daydreaming. Eliza believes that having jobs at a young age will teach her boys manliness and self-reliance. Ben gets up at three o’clock every morning to deliver newspapers. Luke has been a Saturday Evening Post agent since he was twelve, and Eugene is put under his wing. Although the boy loathes the work, he is forced every Thursday to corner potential customers and keep up a continuous line of chatter until he breaks down their sales resistance.

Eugene is not yet eight when his parents separate. Eliza has bought the Dixieland boardinghouse as a good investment. Eugene’s sister Helen remains at the old house with her father; Daisy has married and left town. Mrs. Gant takes Eugene with her, and Ben and Luke are left to shift for themselves, shuttling back and forth between the two houses. Eugene grows to detest his new home. When the Dixieland is crowded, there is no privacy, and Eliza advertises the Dixieland on printed cards that Eugene has to distribute to customers on his magazine route and to travelers arriving at the Altamont train station.

Although life at the boardinghouse is drab, the next four years are the golden days of Eugene’s youth, for he is allowed to go to the Leonards’ private school. Margaret Leonard, the tubercular wife of the schoolmaster, recognizes Eugene’s hunger for beauty and love and is able to find in literature the words that she herself has not the power to utter. By the time he is fifteen, Eugene knows the greatest lyric poems almost line for line.

Eugene is also about to encounter other changes in his life. Oliver Gant, who was fifty when his youngest son was born, is beginning to feel his years. Although he is never told, he is slowly dying of cancer. Eugene is fourteen when World War I begins, and Ben, who wants to join the Canadian army, is warned by his doctor that he will be refused because he has weak lungs.

At age fifteen, Eugene is sent to the university at Pulpit Hill. It is his father’s plan that Eugene should be well on his way toward being a great statesman before the time comes for old Oliver to die. Eugene’s youth and tremendous height make him a natural target for dormitory horseplay, and his shy, awkward manners are intensified by his ignorance of the school’s traditions and rituals. He rooms alone, and his only friends are four wastrels, one of whom contributes to his social education by introducing him to a brothel.

That summer, back at the Dixieland, Eugene meets Laura James. Sitting with her on the front porch at night, he is taken in by her quiet smile and clear, candid eyes. He becomes her lover on a summer afternoon of sunlit green and gold. Afterward, however, Laura goes home to visit her parents and writes to Eugene to tell him that she is about to marry a boy to whom she has been engaged for nearly a year.

Eugene goes back to Pulpit Hill in the autumn, still determined to go his way alone. Although he has no intimate friends, he gradually becomes a campus leader. The commonplace good fellows of his world tolerantly make room for the one who is not like them.

In October of the following year, Eugene receives an urgent summons to come home. Ben is finally paying the price of his parents’ neglect and the drudgery of his life: He is dying of pneumonia. Eliza has neglected to call a competent doctor until it is too late, and Oliver, as he sits at the foot of the dying boy’s bed, can think only of the burial expenses. As the family members keep their vigil through Ben’s last night, they are touched by the realization of the greatness of the boy’s generous soul. In a final irony, Ben is given the best funeral that money can buy.

With Ben go the family’s last pretenses. When Eugene returns to the Dixieland after graduation, Eliza is in control of Oliver’s property and is selling it as quickly as she can to get money for further land speculation. She has disposed of their old home, and Oliver is living in a back room of the boardinghouse. His children watch one another suspiciously as he wastes away, each concerned for his or her own inheritance. Eugene manages to remain unembroiled in their growing hatred of one another, but he cannot avoid being a target for that hatred. Helen, Luke, and Steve have always resented his schooling. In September, before Eugene leaves for Harvard to begin graduate work, Luke asks him to sign a release saying that he has received his inheritance as tuition and school expenses. Although his father had promised him an education when he was still a child and Eliza was to pay for his first year in the North, Eugene is glad to sign. He is free, and he is never coming back to Altamont.

On his last night at home, Eugene has a vision of his dead brother Ben in the moonlit square at midnight: Ben, the unloved of the Gants, and the most lovable. It is for Eugene as well a vision of old, unhappy, unforgotten years, and in his restless imagination, he dreams of the hidden door through which he will escape forever the mountain-rimmed world of his boyhood.

Bibliography

Bruccoli, Arlyn, and Matthew J. Bruccoli. "Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life." Thomas Wolfe Review 30.1 (2006): 144–47. Print.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Chelsea, 1987. Print.

Crowder, Elizabeth. "Mother vs. Daughter: The Relationship between Eliza and Helen in 'Look Homeward, Angel.'" Thomas Wolfe Review 31.1 (2007): 62–77. Print.

Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. 1987. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.

Eckard, Paula Gallant. "'A flash of fire': Illness and the Body in Look Homeward, Angel." Thomas Wolfe Review 34.1 (2010): 6–24. Print.

Ensign, Robert Taylor. Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2003. Print.

Holliday, Shawn. Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Lang, 2001. Print.

Idol, John Lane, Jr. A Thomas Wolfe Companion. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Print.

Johnston, Carol Ingalls. Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe, His Novels, and the Critics. Columbia: Camden, 1996. Print.

Wolfe, Thomas. The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe. 2 vols. Ed. Richard S. Kennedy and Paschal Reeves. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1970. Print.

Wolfe, Thomas. O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life—The Original Version of “Look Homeward, Angel.” Text est. by Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000. Print.