Look Homeward, Angel

This book reminds me why I love to read early Twentieth Century literature. There are passages in Wolfe's writing where I would not wonder if he was divinely inspired. A "coming of age story", Look Homeward, Angel is the thinly veiled autobiography of Thomas Wolfe's upbringing in the North Carolina mountains. Look Homeward, Angel is among some of the best literature that I have ever read.

Raised in a troubled, and often violent family, he struggles to understand his parents and siblings but most of all himself. He knows that he is a pariah and even when he comes into adulthood, he finds himself a lonely outcast, too brilliant to be comfortable in any setting. The book is not as widely embraced as it was years ago possibly because it can be racially offensive. Yet anyone who reads the book must consider the time period in which it was written. Throughout the book I was haunted by the fact that Thomas Wolfe only lived to be thirty seven years old, succumbing to tuberculosis in 1938. I wished he had lived to write more.