In the Library
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 40
- Length
- Length 216k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Joyce's Stephen Dedalus strains against family, church, and homeland to become an artist, the same hunger that drives Eugene Gant, but rendered in cooler, more exacting prose.
£1.99
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
Philip Carey burns with the same restless hunger to escape a small life and find himself, but Maugham's prose stays plain where Wolfe's floods and swells.
£1.99
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence's Paul Morel is bound to his mother with the same suffocating love that grips the Gant house, but the wound here is erotic rather than elegiac.
£1.99
About the book
A marble angel stands outside a stonecutter's shop in the Carolina mountains, carved by a father who drinks too much and dreams too large, left in the yard unsold for years. Eugene Gant grows up beneath it, one of seven children raised on quarrels and hunger in his mother's boardinghouse, where every room is rented but love is metered out like coal. Thomas Wolfe writes it all in a flood, sentences that swell and pile and refuse to stop, because Eugene cannot stop wanting: more books, more towns, more of a world his family will never leave. Then his brother Ben, sardonic and beloved, dies of influenza in an upstairs room, and the family that never learned to speak to one another gathers around a silence too late to break. Eugene leaves Altamont still hearing him. Naked and alone we came into exile, Wolfe writes, and no book has ever made that loneliness sing so loudly.