Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel begins with a contemplation on the universality of human life. Wolfe reflects on the connections between human lives separated by distance and time when he states, “every moment is a window on all time” (5). Wolfe begins his tale of the Gant family’s arrival in America with the simple line, “This is a moment” (5).

The Gant family’s American roots took hold after the 1837 immigration of Englishman Gilbert Gaunt, who changed the family surname to the more phonetically American “Gant.” On his new American adventures, Gilbert made an unsuccessful living through illegal cock-fighting until finally settling among the Dutch in the Pennsylvanian countryside, where he married a young widow and charmed the other Dutch settlers, who proclaimed that “he should have been an actor” (5).

Gilbert bore five children, and “his bright somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged” (6) over his lifetime until his sudden death by apoplexy. In death Gilbert’s eyes were “bright and open,” and filled with “a passionate and obscure hunger for voyages” (6), which he passed on to his son Oliver.

The narrative shifts to Gilbert’s heir apparent, Oliver Gant, who at the age of 15 discovers a passion for stone-cutting after encountering a carved funeral angel in a Baltimore shop. Upon this discovery, Oliver’s “cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man’s eyes” (6). Oliver works as a stonecutter’s apprentice for five years in Baltimore before becoming a stonecutter himself, although “he never learned to carve an angel’s head” (6). Instead, Oliver falls in a pattern of working, drinking, and performing theatrical rants, a pattern he continues as he travels into the Reconstructionist South until he reaches the fictional Southern capital city of Sydney. After a brief spell of sobriety in Sydney, during which he marries a financially stable but “gaunt” and “tubercular” spinster named Cynthia, Oliver returns to his destructive ways. Cynthia dies suddenly from a hemorrhage, and the town blames Oliver’s destructive ways for Cynthia’s death. Possibly ill himself with tuberculosis and ashamed, Oliver escapes westward in search of a new life.

Only 30 years old, Oliver reflects on his life as he travels westward by train, questioning how he ended up in his current seemingly dire situation; “Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die” (8). As Oliver continues his journey by coach into his new home of Altamont, he revives in spirit and in heart.

With about $1,200 in savings, Oliver opens his stone-cutting business once again. After enduring an isolated winter in his new home, Oliver heals and connects with the Altamont locals in the spring. He is particularly struck by the apocalyptic ramblings of one Bacchus Pentland, who proclaims the approach of Armageddon.

Shortly after, Oliver meets the niece of Bacchus Pentland, Eliza Pentland, who enters his shop to sell books. As Eliza shares her ambitious desires to own property, Oliver feels “a stirring […] of a joy he thought he had lost forever” (13). He meets Eliza’s large family, who are all as garrulous as Eliza and love to make puns and jokes. The chapter ends with Oliver’s ruminations on the inevitability of death.