Explore "Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This journey to California was Gant's last great voyage. He made it two years after Eliza's return from St. Louis, when he was fifty-six years old. In the great frame was already stirring the chemistry of pain and death. Unspoken and undefined there was in him the knowledge that he was at length caught in the trap of life and fixity, that he was being borne under in this struggle against the terrible will that wanted to own the earth more than to explore it. This was the final flare of the old hunger that had once darkened in the small gray eyes, leading a boy into new lands and toward the soft stone smile of an angel.
And he returned from nine thousand miles of wandering, to the bleak bare prison of the hills on a gray day late in winter.