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About Look Homeward, Angel

Dazzlingly rich, lyrical and elegiac, Thomas Wolfe’s vibrant autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, follows the story of Eugene Gant, the ninth and last child born to alcoholic Oliver and go-getting Eliza in the fictional town of Altemont, based on Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. The novel recounts Eugene’s early life, up to his departure from home at the age of 19. A brilliant and restless young man struck by family tragedy, Eugene possesses a great imagination and voracious appetite for experience, which give him a burning desire to leave his tumultuous small-town life in search of something better. Thomas Wolfe’s epic voice – poetic and rhapsodic, brimming with joy, existential terror and rage – had an earth-shattering effect on the literary landscape of America in the early 20th-century, raising him up alongside legendary writers of the American South, such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner.