Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel

By Thomas Wolfe.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. To the Reader
5. Epigraph
6. Look Homeward, Angel
   1. Part I
      1. Epigraph
      2. I
      3. II
      4. III
      5. IV
      6. V
      7. VI
      8. VII
      9. VIII
      10. IX
      11. X
      12. XI
      13. XII
      14. XIII
   2. Part II
      1. XIV
      2. XV
      3. XVI
      4. XVII
      5. XVIII
      6. XIX
      7. XX
      8. XXI
      9. XXII
      10. XXIII
      11. XXIV
      12. XXV
      13. XXVI
      14. XXVII
   3. Part III
      1. XXVIII
      2. XXIX
      3. XXX
      4. XXXI
      5. XXXII
      6. XXXIII
      7. XXXIV
      8. XXXV
      9. XXXVI
      10. XXXVII
      11. XXXVIII
      12. XXXIX
      13. XL
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To A. B.

“Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis’d in you, (in whom alone
I understand, and grow and see,)
The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
Which tile this house, will come againe.”

To the Reader

This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical⁠—that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than Gulliver’s Travels cannot easily be imagined.

This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fullness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.

But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives⁠—all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method, but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.

“At one time the earth was probably a white-hot sphere like the sun.”

Tarr and McMurry

Look Homeward, Angel

A Story of the Buried Life

Part I

… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

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?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

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.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like