The road is life where you never find your father. It’s a familiar path. Some have suggested this is the oldest story, the baseline narrative of the human condition. Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel is a bald instance of the genre, later reflected on the impetus for the story. His answer appeals to the epic: From the beginning—and this was one fact that in all my times of hopelessness returned to fortify my faith in my conviction—the idea, the central legend that I wished my book to express had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me,
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