Look Homeward, Angel (1929) follows Eugene Gant from boyhood in Altamont -- Wolfe's Asheville -- toward artistic awakening. A modernist Bildungsroman, it marries Whitmanesque cadences and Proustian memory to raw regional realism. The stonecutter father, boardinghouse mother, and the titular angel -- Milton's echo -- organize themes of appetite, mortality, and departure, while long, incantatory sentences enlarge provincial life into national myth. Born in Asheville in 1900, Wolfe drew directly on his mother's boardinghouse and his father's monument shop, transmuting family tumult into art. Trained as a dramatist at UNC and Harvard's 47 Workshop under George Pierce Baker, then teaching in New York and traveling Europe, he delivered the vast O Lost, which Maxwell Perkins condensed, preserving its grief over Ben's death and its candid hometown portraits. Readers who relish ambitious, musical prose and the American artist's coming-of-age -- from Joyce to Faulkner -- will find this essential. Approach for its luminous sentences and thickly realized Southern milieu; stay for its restless intelligence about home and exile. Few novels render provincial experience so capaciously or so movingly.

Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable -- distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.

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• Literature & FictionGenre FictionComing of Age
• Literature & FictionLiterary Fiction

• Publication Date: January 10, 2026
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
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• Print Length: 188 Pages
• File Size: 12 KB