Never Won a Major Prize
Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
Summary
Eugene Gant grows up in a sprawling, quarrelsome family running a boardinghouse in a small North Carolina mountain town, hungry from childhood for a wider world beyond the mountains that hem him in. Wolfe writes in a torrential, autobiographical style that piles sensory detail upon sensory detail, capturing both the suffocation of small town family life and the desperate yearning to escape it. The novel's raw candor about Wolfe's own hometown scandalized many of its real life residents upon publication.
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Historical Context & Significance
The 1930 Pulitzer for fiction went to Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy, leaving Wolfe's sprawling debut without a major prize. Wolfe died just eight years later at thirty seven, having published only two novels during his lifetime.