Shortly after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe traveled to York Springs, a village in Pennsylvania, to visit with his deceased father’s kin. W. O. Gant, the father of the novel’s protagonist, was modeled by Wolfe on his own father, William Oliver Wolfe. In a letter to his mother in North Carolina, Wolfe recounted his look homeward to the litter of hinterland villages and hamlets where his father had farmed. The pastoral prettiness of the region stirred him to extoll the “great fields and mighty stone barns, the richest, fattest farming county you ever looked at.” A second letter, composed in New York City, mused on the character of the English, Scot-Irish, and Germans pioneers who had debarked in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and hacked their way through the forests. “As I walk through the crowded and noisy streets of this immense city, and look at the dark swarthy faces of Jews, Italians, Greeks,” Wolfe wrote, “I realize more keenly than ever that I come from the old Americans — the people who settled the country, who fought in its wars, who pushed westward.”
Christmas on Red Hill, or The Birth of Misotheism
