"Look Homeward, Angel" is a highly autobiographical American coming-of-age story published in 1929 by Thomas Wolfe. The novel is divided into three parts and chronicles the life of the Gant family, particularly the growth of Eugene Gant, a character considered an extension of Wolfe¹².
The story begins with the history of the Gant family, tracing their origins to the migration of patriarch Gilbert Gaunt from England to America. William Oliver Gant, Gilbert’s son, finds a passion for stone-cutting in Baltimore and sets up a stone-cutting business in the town of Altamont after the death of his first wife, Cynthia¹.
William marries Eliza Pentland and they have six children. Throughout their marriage, William struggles with alcoholism and is sent away for recovery multiple times¹. In 1900, Eliza gives birth to the final Gant child, Eugene. When Eugene is four years old, the family moves to St. Louis for the 1904 World’s Fair, where tragedy strikes as Grover eats a contaminated pear and dies¹.
The family moves back to Altamont, and as Eliza invests in more properties despite William’s disapproval, Helen, now 15, becomes a caretaker for her father¹. Eugene, misunderstood by his siblings and peers, finds solace only in his brother Ben and escapes into the fictional fantasy worlds he finds in books¹.
In 1904, when Eugene is four years old, Eliza, in pursuit of a new adventure, moves the family to St. Louis for the World’s Fair¹. Tragedy strikes when Grover eats a contaminated pear at the fair and dies¹. The family moves back to Altamont, and as Eliza invests in more properties despite Gant’s disapproval, Helen, now 15, becomes a caretaker for her father¹. Gant takes his final solo trip to California at the age of 56¹.
Eugene, misunderstood by his siblings and peers, finds solace only in his brother Ben¹. As Eugene grows, he escapes into the fictional fantasy worlds he finds in books¹. He has a literary curiosity of prodigious proportions, and he reads books of all sorts, many at a time². He has great energy and considerable zest for sports, even though he is awkward and ungainly on the baseball diamond². An imaginative boy, he is prone to indulge in vividly embroidered daydreams which cast an idealized counterpart of himself as an invincible hero². He has some awkward misadventures with women, which seem later to arouse further longings in him².
During this period there occur some richly comic episodes, as when Eugene’s father prepares an elegant stone angel as a burial monument for a prostitute². Eugene's adolescent years are characterized by various themes and motifs. He could remember that before he was ten years old he would brood upon what seemed to be tantalizingly unanswerable contradictions that went to the very nature of the human spirit².
The novel is a comprehensive display of life in the American South from 1900 to 1920, and a response to the modernist movement of American writers who were living and writing in Europe⁵. It is a stream-of-consciousness narrative that focuses on the first two decades of the 20th century, including the beginning and end of World War I¹. The novel ends with Eugene leaving his home and family to attend the University of North Carolina¹.