This vigorous, effusive, realistic novel focuses on a family of six children. The parents, W. O. Gant, a promiscuous, alcoholic stone cutter, and Eliza, a conniving woman who is greedy to own property, have a combative marriage. Eliza buys Dixieland, a boarding house, which she runs to support herself when she leaves her husband.

Wolfe understands well the interactions of the people about whom he is writing. He writes about himself with candor and insight, detailing his coming-of-age.

In contrast to his life at Dixieland, which he loathes, is Eugene’s life at a private school run by the Leonards. Margaret Leonard recognizes Eugene’s potential and fuels his love of literature. At 15, after four years at the Leonard’s School, Eugene, now unusually tall, goes to the university at Pulpit Hill.

While he is there, his brother Ben dies. The material on Ben’s death is some of the most sensitive in the novel. Eugene finally is graduated from the university, and as the novel closes, his father, now dying of cancer, is spending his last months in a drab room at Dixieland. Eugene goes off to graduate school.

This book, huge in scope, is convincing in its realism and moving in its passion.

Bibliography:

Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bloom, himself a distinguished critic, gathers in his book eight essays by seven different writers, suggesting that the collection is what he considers “the most useful criticism of Thomas Wolfe’s fiction.” A bibliography of critical pieces on Wolfe is included.

Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987. Donald prepared this admired biography of Wolfe with the aid of the novelist’s voluminous papers, lodged at Harvard University. The preface announces that, in addition to Wolfe’s biography, an attempt is made to offer “a group photograph . . . of what can properly be called the Great Generation in American literature.”

Idol, John Lane, Jr. A Thomas Wolfe Companion. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. A very useful handbook for the study of Wolfe. It includes a selected bibliography of Wolfe publications, an annotated bibliography of criticism, and a short list of information sources. A helpful glossary of characters and places identifies many characters and places fictionalized by Wolfe.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955. Rubin considers Wolfe’s first novel as autobiographical fiction and then moves on to examine “the meaning of the time structure” in Wolfe’s fiction.

Wolfe, Thomas. The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe. 2 vols. Edited by Richard S. Kennedy and Paschal Reeves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. The first in this two-volume set includes the entire period when Wolfe was at work on Look Homeward, Angel. Editors’ notes help relate Wolfe’s various jottings to incidents in his book.