"All that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him with desire and longing"

Eugene Gant, the centrar figure in Thomas Wolfe's account of a boy growing to manhood in small-town America early this century, possesses
"a wild energy" and a n equally fervent imagination. A lonely idealist in pirsuit of "the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven", he scours literature and the world for fresh wonders until confronted eventually by the intrasigent reality of death and disease.

"He had that flair for the extravagant and fantastic which has been an American characteristic from Irving and Poe to Dashiell Hammett"- F. Scott oFitzgerald