Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel, novel by Thomas Wolfe, published in 1929. It is a thinly veiled autobiography.

The novel traces the unhappy early years of the introspective protagonist, Eugene Gant, before he sets off for graduate study at Harvard. Wolfe employed a remarkable variety of literary styles in the novel, reflecting Gant’s shifting feelings and attitudes: evocative description, acutely realistic dialogue, satire, fantasy, and meandering passages in which the author becomes intoxicated with his own prose. Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (1935) continues Gant’s story.