Look Homeward, Angel

Usually the first book of a young writer is a book of discovery. From his meager experience, accentuated by his youth, comes a knowledge so new and so startling and so wonderful that its pain is almost beyond bearing. Mellow, many-faceted understanding is not for now; understanding is the hard reward of decades of summers (Walser 53).

This novel was written from a need for discovery and 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 op

. . .
r: For although Look Homeward, Angel is in many ways a Naturalistic novel, its protagonist is an imaginative young man of torrential vitality and idealism for whom a Naturalistic view of life can never be enough (Hagan 269). Darlene H. Unrue suggests that the novel has much in common with the Southern Gothic style and that its images evoke that view of life: A closer look reveals that it abounds in archetypal Gothic images that appeal to readers subliminally; it shares with other Southern Gothic works the significant elements of both Southern and Gothic setting (bells, darkness, wind, a decaying mansion, labyrinths, an abyss, and eerie music), a quest, imprisonment, a ghost, and themes of isolation and fear of annihilation (Unrue 48). The interpretation that this is an autobiographical novel runs through most criticism, for it is clear that much of the story of Eugene Gant parallels events in Wolfe's life, and more importantly that the development of Gant as an artist reflects Wolfe's personal concerns and experiences. The story told in Look Homeward, Angel corresponds roughly with the first twenty years of Wolfe's life. Eugene Gant is the character who stands in for Wolfe. The novel carries Eugene through his college
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1570
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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