"Look Homeward, Angel" is an American coming-of-age story. The novel is considered to be autobiographical and the character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Thomas Wolfe himself. Set in the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, it covers the span of time from Eugene's birth to the age of 19. "Of Time and the River" is the continuation of the story of Eugene Gant, detailing his early and mid-twenties. During that time Eugene attends Harvard University, moves to New York City, teaches English at a university there, and travels overseas with his friend Francis Starwick. "You Can't Go Home Again" George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town, he is shaken by the force of outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and lifelong friends feel naked and exposed by what they have seen in his books, and their fury drives him from his home. Outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. It takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was an American novelist of the early twentieth century. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.