Thomas Wolfe

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 haunte

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nd a need for assessing the knowledge of a young man: By 1926 Thomas Wolfe had found out many things, but only through a creative act could his knowledge be refined into truth. For artists, it has always been so (Walser 53). Wolfe wrote the novel at first in the first person, and the "I" would later be replaced by "Eugene": Before the first draft was completed, seventeen large ledgers would be filled with his generous scrawl. . . A month after its publication Wolfe tried to make clear to his mother that its theme was clearly stated in the opening pages: "that we are born alone--all of us who ever lived or will live--that we live alone, and die alone, and that we are strangers to one another, and never come to know one another" (Walser 53-54). Wolfe's work shows that the author sees human beings as huge and terrible and immortal: He is a writer of stupendous egotism; his prime interest is in the development of himself as an artist and in his struggle to resolve his own mental conflicts. Because he naturally understands himself better than he understands anybody else, he assumes too much penetration on behalf of the reader; Eugene-George is only half the man. Wolfe omits many essentials concerning him because they are

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