This is Wolfe's first novel, a story of growing up in the fictional town of Altamont, closely modelled on his native Asheville. It follows Eugene Gant from his birth through boyhood and adolescence to his departure for university. Around him is a restless, quarrelsome family: his stonemason father Oliver, a large-voiced man given to drink and grand speeches, and his shrewd, property-minded mother Eliza. Wolfe fills the book with vivid small-town scenes, family tensions, and a young man's loneliness and yearning for something larger than his surroundings. Written in lyrical, sometimes overflowing prose, it is a classic American novel of youth and one of the great autobiographical novels of the twentieth century.