Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel is the first novel by the American writer Thomas Wolfe, published in 1929 with the subtitle A Story of the Buried Life.

The town is Altamont, a version of Asheville, North Carolina, and Wolfe drew it from life so closely that the book caused trouble at home when it appeared. Eugene's family runs a monument shop, which is where the angel of the title comes from; his mother's boarding house fills with paying guests and his siblings take up the rooms and arguments of a house that is always crowded and never settled. The novel's method is accumulative rather than plotted, and its pleasures are in the language and the mass of detail: the shop, the school, the newspaper office, the long family evenings and the death that turns the second half of the book towards a different register. Wolfe wrote a very long manuscript that was cut and reorganised by his editor Maxwell Perkins before publication, and a restored version of the original, titled O Lost, was published in 2000, which is why the book exists in more than one shape.