Look Homeward, Angel is a novel about the family history, childhood and education of a young man who chooses a career as a writer. Though even the place names are fictional, it is clearly based on Wolfe's own upbringing in Asheville, North Carolina. Eugene Gant is the name Wolfe gives to his alter ego, but the story begins with his father, Oliver Gant, in Pennsylvania. Much of the novel focuses, in fact, on the family members whose tragic and often bizarre life experiences would inevitably influence Eugene as a writer.

Eugene's father Oliver is a violent, Shakespeare-quoting, alcoholic stonemason. His mother is a miserly boarding-house operator who doesn't mind housing prostitutes and other persons of questionable repute as long as they pay the bills. His older brothers and sisters have equally colorful histories. Eugene grows up amidst this chaotic environment as a frail and bookish youth, torn in his loyalties between his perpetually warring parents.

What appealed to me most about Look Homeward, Angel was its depiction of life in North Carolina in the first two decades of the 20th century. It is far from the stereotype of the South as an indolent rural land of self-righteous nostalgia (a stereotype even the editors at Penguin fell for by putting a farm scene on the cover of my edition--there's scarcely a mention of a farm in the entire novel). Instead the setting is that of a bustling, boisterous and often bawdy resort town growing rapidly into a small city.

Writing at a time when Hemingway and others were paring language down to its essentials, Wolfe's style is a throwback to the Romantic age. His florid prose can be beautiful and moving at times, but wearisome at others. Among the crowded ranks of autobiographical coming-of-age novels, Look Homeward, Angel is not the greatest, but it is still very much worth reading. ( )

I first read this book about 10 years ago and i was so impressed that i read it twice. Now ten years later and after the third read i must say it is still the most beautiful book i ever read. Wolfe has a way of describing how he feels and sees things like no other. ( )

I am usually in favor of more stark prose, but this ornate story captured my imagination. The actual plot dragged quite a bit...the protaganist, Eugene Gant, isn't even born until quite a ways into the book. But each little section of the book can almost be taken as a story in itself. ( )

A lurid portrait of working class America in the hill country of North Carolina. ( )

"I think Tom [Thomas Wolfe] was only truly good about his home townand there he was wonderful and unsurpassable. The other stuff is usually over-inflated journalese."
Letter to Maxwell Perkins, 1940
Selected Letters, pg. 517