Wolfe wrote it after a visit from his mother in New York, and it is different from almost anything else he wrote, for it is without a third person narrator or editorial comment. Reading “The Web of Earth” in the early 1980s helped steer me toward writing in the voice of a woman character, toward letting the character tell her own story. That connection with a living voice is, for me, at the heart of fiction writing. We read novels, and we write them, to know and touch other lives, and to listen to other voices.

“That was the year the locusts came: it seems so long ago since the year the locusts came, and all the earth was eaten bare, it seems so long ago. But no (I thought) the thing kept puzzlin’ me, you know — it can’t be that, there hasn’t been time enough for that, it was only the year before in January — Lord! Lord! I often think of all that I’ve been through, and wonder that I’m here to tell it. I reckon for a fact I had the power of Nature in me; why! No more trouble than the earth takes bearing corn, all the children, the eight who lived, and all the others that you never heard about…” (“The Web of Earth,” p. 148)

One of the special things I learned from “The Web of Earth” was that it is the unpredictableness of a narrator that makes the voice most alive. The speaker keeps surprising us, but the sentences seem inevitable once we hear them. I also saw the advantages of a woman narrator. Women are usually closer observers of detail, and they are more willing to talk about their feelings, their relationships, than men are. The novella was a revelation of intimacy, paradox of close characterization, and toughness.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Thomas Wolfe to the younger generation of North Carolina writers. The soaring energy of the prose, the exuberance of his vision are only part of his significance. Even more important is the sense of place, the bond with place, which his writing dramatizes and fosters. However satiric or ironic his Altamont is, and his mountain folks are, he wrote of life here in the first decades of the twentieth century with remarkable accuracy and understanding. However romantic his prose and his protagonist may seem, Wolfe was willing to portray the greed and absurdities of that world, the corruption of politics, the hypocrisy that tainted and limited our culture then, and now, as well as the intense family loyalties, brotherly affection, and mystery of the mountains themselves.

It is also hard to overstate the significance of seeing in a famous book people and places that you recognize. When I was a boy we went to Asheville about once a year to buy Christmas presents or school clothes. To me it was the great city on a hill. Asheville was the promise of the great world beyond the mountains. I had seen the Square, the Battery Park Hotel, the train station, and Beaucatcher Mountain. To see those places live again in Wolfe’s prose was an inspiration and exhortation, whispering in my ear write, write, write.

It is a pleasure to have this new edition of Look Homeward, Angel as an occasion to celebrate the high water mark of his achievement in American fiction, the heritage of greatness he has given us. It is also a pleasure to look forward, to the future, to the writers of the new century who will be the heirs and beneficiaries of Wolfe’s legacy. We can look backward to the height and scale of Wolfe’s masterwork, but also forward. As Wolfe says on the final page of his classic book: “Yet, as he stood for the last time by the angels of his father’s porch, it seemed as if the Square already were far and lost; or, I should say, he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say ‘The town is near,’ but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges” (p. 508).

Almost eight decades after Look Homeward, Angel’s first publication, it is an honor to salute Wolfe’s courage and honesty, his great artistry and largeness of vision. It is still painful that he died so young and that his best work might have been ahead of him. But the wonder is what he did accomplish in his short life. He belonged to a great era of American writing. It is a privilege to pass his work on to a new generation of readers.

ROBERT MORGAN

Thomas Wolfe1.

When in the spring of 1947 William B. Wisdom, of New Orleans, presented to the Harvard College Library his distinguished collection of Thomas Wolfe, it was at once apparent that the person above all others to provide an introduction to it was Maxwell E. Perkins, ’07, of Charles Scribner’s Sons, editor of Wolfe’s first novels, and allied to Wolfe by the closest ties of profession and of friendship.