A History of American Literature

462 Making It New: 1900–1945

being, pulses through all her work. It is what makes it at once true to the realities

of the lives of ordinary working-class women, their struggle for survival, and

responsive to other, mythic pressures – so that each woman she describes in her

fiction, journalism, and poetry seems alive with the lives of others, of other places

and generations, and with the “ancient ripening” of the earth.

Prophetic voices

“I believe that we are lost here in America,” wrote Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), “but

I believe we shall be found. And this belief ... is not only our hope, but America’s

everlasting, living dream.” That remark captures the abiding romanticism of

Wolfe’s work, its concern with loss and prophecy, and its search for a self-realization

that is coextensive with the discovery of national identity. It also captures its dualism.

All Wolfe’s writing weaves its way between an intricate pattern of opposites: the

rural past and the urban future, rootedness and escape, the “lonely austerity and

mystery of the dark earth” where Wolfe and his protagonists grow up and “the

powerful movement of the train” carrying them away from that place to ever wider

horizons. “It seemed to him,” observes Wolfe of his hero, Eugene Gant, in Of Time

and the River (1935), “that these two terrific negatives of speed and stillness, the

hustling and projectile movement of the train and the calm silence of the everlasting

earth, were poles of a single unity – a unity coherent with his destiny, whose source

was somehow in himself.” Wolfe claimed “the enormous space and energy of America

as a whole” as his subject. He also described his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel

(1929), as “the story of a powerful creative element trying to work its way toward

an essential isolation, a creative solitude, a secret life.” There was no contradiction

here for him, however, because, like Whitman and many other American writers, he

saw the story of the nation as the story of his individual self – for he was Eugene

Gant, he was the “powerful creative element,” the source and subject of his fiction.

And in working out his own perplexities, in prose that moves back and forth between

lofty romanticism and literal prosaicism, rhetoric and reportage, he was trying to

confront and if possible resolve the problem of the nation as it vacillated between

loss and hope, its historical failure and its “everlasting, living dream.”

Wolfe was born and raised in the mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina,

the place that became the “Old Catawba” of his fiction. As he became Eugene Gant

in his first two novels, so his father, a powerful stonecutter from the North, became

the prototype of Eugene’s father Oliver. And his mother, in turn, a member of a

puritanical mountain family, became the prototype of Eugene’s mother, Eliza Gant:

a woman who, like Wolfe’s own mother, combines the “visionary fanaticism” of her

ancestors with a “hard monied sense” that leads her, among other things, to move

out of the family home to open a boarding-house. Leaving home himself, Wolfe

entered the University of North Carolina in 1920, where he wrote and acted in

several plays. Then, after studying at Harvard and writing more drama, he traveled

abroad for a while before returning to teach literature at New York University.

With the publication of Look Homeward, Angel he was able to give up teaching and

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