Thomas Wolfe was an author who included details of his own life in his novels while at the same time denying that he was writing autobiography in any literal sense. This shows that there is a certain duality in his work, a two-pronged path taken by the author, with a certain degree of tension developing between the desire on his part to express attitudes toward elements from his life while at the same time developing these concepts as fiction as if to hide the connection. This duality was such that it bothered the author even as it has left many of his readers and critics confused about where autobiography begins and ends and fiction takes the lead. In Look Homeward, Angel, the connections between Wolfe and his character Eugene Gant are particularly strong, and the tensions in the author between what he draws on from his own life and his desire to hide give the book its peculiar energy and a certain sense of mystery in its broadest sense.
McElderry notes the scope of the issue when he writes,
That Wolf's Eugene Gant is a fictional representation of his own character and experience seems self-evident. . . Obvious as it is that both Thomas Wolfe and Eugene Gant grew up in a North Carolina resort town, were present at the death of a beloved older brother, and attended the state university, the autobiographical problem remains. In Wolfe's letters to Mrs. Roberts and to his mother, in conversations with his friends, and in The Story of a Novel, he shows that he was haunted by the recognizably direct relation between his experience and his fiction. He felt a difference, but could never clearly articulate what that difference was (McElderry 53-54).
The novel began as a means for Wolfe to put down on paper the flood of childhood memories then occupying his thoughts. There were other influences evident in the book as well, notably the literature and poetry into which Wolfe had immersed himself, and particularly James Joyce's U...