But one afternoon in 1960 I saw a huge volume in gray cloth with Look Homeward, Angel printed on the spine. I’d seen Thomas Wolfe’s picture in the Hendersonville newspaper, along with a photograph of a stone angel in the local cemetery that was supposed to have inspired him. I knew that was the book I had to read.

Wolfe was often mentioned in the newspaper in those days. There was still an air of scandal and mystery about him. He was a local legend, having grown up in Asheville just some thirty miles away, and having written his famous book about Asheville and about his family.

When I took Look Homeward, Angel from the bookmobile and began reading it, and looking at the Gorsline illustrations, I felt this was the book I’d always been looking for. It was a novel about me, and it was more than a novel. It was a revelation about how ambitious and thrilled and scared I was, and about how “lost” I felt. Eugene Gant’s parents seemed like my own parents, and his anxieties and frustrations and sense of destiny were my own. As so many other American boys had before and have since, I discovered a version of myself in Look Homeward, Angel, and I became intoxicated with the elevated, poetic prose. I felt I had discovered a new poetry in the choral sections, in the soliloquies.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
…Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. (p. 6)

To me this sounded better than Homer and Shakespeare combined. I didn’t really know Homer or very much Shakespeare, but I was sure this was what was meant by epic writing, and by tragic poetry. I read passages from the book so many times I had them by heart. “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas” (p. 5).

Imagine my exhilaration when I discovered Thomas Wolfe had been born on October 3, 1900, the same day on which I was born forty-four years later in nearby Hendersonville. Our kinship appeared even stronger than I had guessed before. No wonder the language and longings of his book felt so much my own. It appeared to me that Thomas Wolfe had captured for all time the essence and the rage, the fear and poetry of what it meant to be young and alive in Western North Carolina. After describing the long, slow, painful death of Eugene’s brother Ben from consumption, Wolfe says on page 454, “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.”

At the end of the novel, as Eugene Gant is about to set out for the world beyond Asheville, or Altamont, as he walks in the Square at sunrise after hallucinating that the stone angels in his father’s monument shop have come alive and that Ben has returned as a ghost to talk with him, he exhorts himself to set out on his journey, paraphrasing Stephen Daedelus. “I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as any ever sounded; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the labyrinthine ways…” (p. 508).

The theme of the lost language, and the lost world to be recovered, haunted me as much as any other motif in the novel. Reading Wolfe I felt I was recovering a lost language of vision and of the self. The impact of Look Homeward, Angel was a sense of self-discovery and of doom at once. It was similar to what I felt when reading Poe and Whitman and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, all wrapped up in one book. The intensity, the Byronic sadness, the sense of thrilling grief, and of fallenness from a higher world and a higher language, were the most special elements of the experience.

For years I have argued that the American poetic imagination is divided against itself between Emersonian exuberance and openness and the Gothic, symbolist interiors of Poe. It is as though a great schism runs through American literature and culture from the beginning, like the almost invisible crack in the house of Usher. It is as though the two halves of Coleridge’s capacious and troubled brain were projected onto the North American poetic landscape.

Wolfe seems to understand instinctively the paradox at the heart of American culture.