Still, After All These Years, a Classic

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	• Look homeward, angel: A story of the buried life Thomas Wolfe Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947 - 662 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews
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highly recommended

A tour de force of pure emotion

Thomas Wolfe reminds me of the eager kid who was smarter than the rest, surging ahead for pure love of learning and life itself. This transcendental outlook pervades this meandering story which in lesser hands would become saccharine, but veers away from that precipice with carefully constructed characters who are not cut-outs used in the puppet show of stories with a "moral," but these vivid, living, breathing pieces of life that resemble others we have all known.

While the subject matter is romantic to its core in that it combines a knowledge of mortality with a sweet delight in life, between the lines there is a fine-tuned observation of America as a culture of personalities. Wolfe understands the struggles of people both average and exceptional and winds these together to show the common path they are threading as they attempt to understand themselves, so they can appreciate life.

Thomas Wolfe described himself as a "putter-inner" and in this book that might be initially viewed as a problem, since it spills from its pages even after extensive editing with gloriously rich language and a wealth of detail. After the first 100 pages however I stopped caring about this attribute, because my bias against it came from lesser authors who blurt out everything but the kitchen sink in an attempt to appear smarter than they are. Wolfe just delights in the details of life and the subplots that associate a character's journey through it.

I recommend this book most heartily for parents of confused teens. It does not fail to show the shortcomings of our world, our species, and our nation, but it awakens our inner emotional strength that forms the want to overcome those. It does not preach morality, but it shows us the value of our time and from that a moral outlook, since when we care about our time we become more discerning. It took my breath away in its audacity to do the unthinkable, and sing a song of life the imperfect beautiful, and never to back down from that vision of poignant, transient glory.

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We are all Gant's children.

This is perhaps one of the greatest of all American novels but I'm a Tarheel by birth and know the "Altamont" land well so my reasoning may be biased. There are elements in this novel which most overlook because mainly those folks are looking for a quick read. This is not a quick read and is not meant to be. The novel is rich in symbolism so take the time to read AND understand what Wolfe has written. Its about the joys and pains of growing up, the struggle between siblings, the desire to grow beyond one's home, the desire to journey, and the melancholy feeling of returning home at the end of the journey and beginning of another. If you are patient and willing to take Wolfe's adventure, you will see that we are all truly Gan't children in one way or another.

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Still, After All These Years, a Classic

Few writers can coin a phrase or capture a mood or feeling like Thomas Wolfe could. This is never more evident than in "Look Homeward, Angel." After all these years, still a classic, well worth reading for the first time or for another time. His ability to capture mood, colors, feelings and emotions in the depths of the human heart and soul, in and out of family relationships, is remarkable, as is the agelessness of the story. A timeless story of personal growth, coming of age and family dynamics. Well worth the read.

You Can Read Wolfe Again

I was much taken with LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL when I read it as a young man, particularly the chapter on the death of Ben Gant. It was one of the most moving things I had read at the time and I never forgot it. With more years behind me than in front of me, I was curious to see what effect this novel would have on me on a rereading. I found this tome this time to be long, wordy, at times bombastic, with far too many "O Lost's." Mr. Wolfe never misses an opportunity to do long lists, often sounding like Walt Whitman on a bad day. And why on earth would he name Chapel Hill, North Carolina "Pulpit Hill" in the novel?

On the other hand, sometimes Wolfe writes pure poetry; and the novel pulses with life. He has captured a town (Asheville, North Carolina early in the 20th Century) with all its prejudices, idiosyncrasies but hopes as well and has created a family we will never forgot, the Gants. Anyone who knows anything about Thomas Wolfe understands that they are a thinly veiled version of his own family: the bigger-than-life patriarch of the family Gant who has bouts with the bottle; his wife Eliza, obsessed with making a dime at whatever cost; and their children-- Daisy, Helen, the sailor Luke, the twins Grover and Ben and Eugene, based on Wolfe, himself. These characters are as much of the literary history of the United States as Willie Loman, Rabbit Angstrom, the Compson family et al.

Yes, Wolfe's account of the death of Ben Gant at the age of 26 of double pneumonia will tear your heart out. After the Gant family members have spent excruciating days at his deathbed, Eugene has this beautiful words: "We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death--but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door."

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, for all its shortcomings, remains an American classic.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The classic first novel from one of America's greatest men of letters

"I don't know yet what I am capable of doing," wrote Thomas Wolfe at the age of twenty-three, "but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it." Six years later, with the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe gave the world proof of his genius, and he would continue to do so throughout his tumultuous life.

Look Homeward, Angel is the coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, whose restlessness and yearning to experience life to the fullest take him from his rural home in North Carolina to Harvard. Through his rich, ornate prose and meticulous attention to detail, Wolfe evokes the peculiarities of small-town life and the pain and upheaval of leaving home. Heavily autobiographical, Look Homeward, Angel is Wolfe's most turbulent and passionate work, and a brilliant novel of lasting impact.

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