Of course, I’m referring to that classic Thomas Wolfe novel Look Homeward, Angel.

In regard to me being at home, by that I mean I’m living in the city that was Wolfe’s home, Asheville, NC, referred to in the novel as “Altamont”.

I’m certainly not an angel by any means, though I do have an anghel wife, the anghel being Filipino for angel, and my wife is Filipino, so if anyone is looking homeward, it would be her, for she does get homesick, at times…(“,).

As for the novel itself, I’ll have to admit that I was remiss over the years of having not read the famous book. Though an avid reader, for some reason I was never led to look into it.

Most of my high school teachers were obsessed with Dickens and Shakespeare, etcetera. Though I find those works fascinating now, I found them totally boring as a young teen. And I most likely would have had the same feelings about Wolfe and his autobiographical novel.

Though it does deal with the feelings of a growing young boy making his way through his early life to puberty, adolescence, young adulthood and college graduation, I would have most likely missed catching the deep intellectual themes he professed in his superlative prose. Sure, I was young, too, but of a different generation, a totally different era.

And most likely I was never introduced to Wolfe and his works since many colleges and critics had begun to ignore Wolfe, not considering his works to fit their definition of literary canon, therefore leading my teachers to ignore him as well, much to the great loss of their students.

However, reading it after so many decades of ignoring it, I found the book totally fascinating in regard to reading about an early Asheville.

He makes mention of so many places that exist to this day. The main site he constantly refers to is the “Square”, which is our Pack Square, right in the center of town. That is where his father’s monument shop was located, the place where an angel statue was placed on the front porch and used for years as advertisement.

The site today is memorialized with a small stature in front of the Jackson Building, the only skyscraper in the city, a future building mentioned in the book, for Wolfe’s mother sold the property the shop was on to developers who planned the skyscraper.

Another mention of a prominent place is the mention of Wolfe making a trek over a mountain with a young lady to an area called the Cove. That’s in reference to Beaucatcher Mountain. The mountain was so named by James W. Patton, a famous Asheville resident for whom the main street of the city was named. He called it Beaucatcher, teasing his soon-to-be sister-in-law, saying that after watching her stroll the mountainside with her “beau”. And on the other side of the mountain is what is known here as Cades Cove.

That was before there was even a tunnel through the mountain, which was constructed in 1927. And in 1967, an open cut through the mountain was proposed instead of two new tunnels for the interstate planned. The cut was approved and completed in 1980, pretty well destroying a beautiful mountain while creating an ugly eyesore, something Wolfe would have had many comments about for he had already commented on what progress was doing to many great American cities.

While going over the mountain Wolfe mentions going under a bridge, one I greatly suspect to be now known as Helen’s Bridge, the site of an legendary suicide, never documented, but…who knows? He even makes mention of a Helen.

There are many poignant scenes in the book. There’s one about his brother Ben going into a cafe early in the morning after getting off work at the local newspaper, the Citizen, which is the actual name of our hometown paper, now known as the Citizen–Times.

So many interesting characters are there or roam into the cafe during this scene. Especially interesting is the local undertaker and a drunken doctor, scheduled to do an operation in a couple of hours!

But the mention of the newspaper interests me greatly for I once helped my father deliver the Citizen–Times on a morning route. And Wolfe, himself, identified as Eugene in the novel, did morning delivery, though he carried his papers in a sack over his shoulder and walked his route.

Brother Ben plays a big part in Eugene’s life, and his death is of great significance, and in the final scenes of the book where Eugene is visited by the ghost of Ben a monumental finale is lived out.

Another place mentioned in the book is Pulpit Hill, the small town where he went to college. But it’s no longer a small town, or college. It’s actually Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the home of the University of North Carolina. His beginnings there were rather rough but he weathered the freshman storm and had a rather successful college career.

Also telling in the novel is the theme of race. For sure, this was in the era of the Jim Crow South. Though no greatly espoused sense of racism is exhibited, the city is segregated.

And the use of that one now highly unacceptable word to describe the African American characters and the name of their part of the town is very prevalent. But Wolfe was a product of his time and era. And it was that part of the town that Eugene was assigned to do his newspaper delivery in, which leads to many interesting scenes.

Even in my early years that part of the city was determined to be the segregated part that you wished to avoid. I still recall the warnings to be sure and stay away from Eagle Street, right off the main drag leading away from “the Square”.

Wolfe was not circumspect in his description of notable citizens of his hometown as well as his family members which led to estrangement from many in his hometown. Afterwards, he spent many years of his short, remaining life living elsewhere.

And I could go on and on forever about this book for it has touched me greatly.

If I keep it up, I’ll need an editor of Maxwell Perkins’ “genius” to cut a few words from it. But my dear wifey, who introduced me to the blogosphere, will edit it before she posts it on our site, so I’m in good hands.

But I’ve now read Look Homeward, Angel twice, as well as Wolfe’s original “author’s cut” in the reconstructed version O Lost – Wolfe’s original title -, put together by scholars Arlyn and Matthew Bruccoli, published in 2000 on the centennial of Wolfe’s birth, restoring some 60,000 words Perkins edited from the original. Personally, I feel it should have been left alone for the book first published in 1929 was perfect, a true literary canon, regardless of what the so-called experts and critics said.

Just my opinion, but an Asheville boy has to defend another Asheville boy.