# Look Homeward, Angel — Character guide

> Key figures in Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.

- [Eugene Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/eugene_gant.md): Eugene is the youngest Gant, a boy of furious imagination and raw nerve growing up in the boarding house his mother runs in Altamont. He swings between grandiosity and self-loathing, convinced his blood is a subtle elixi
- [Eliza Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/eliza_gant.md): Eliza Gant presides over the Dixieland boarding house, wheedling rent from boarders and snapping at her husband's drunken rages with a tongue honed by years of thrift and grievance. She loves her children fiercely but sh
- [Ben Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/ben_gant.md): Ben Gant is the older brother Eugene loves best, a chain-smoking reporter who paces Altamont's streets at night and stares at his own baby picture with a fear of change he cannot name. He feels life as a ghostly ticking,
- [Helen Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/helen_gant.md): Helen Gant is the Gant daughter who marries Hugh Barton but keeps getting pulled back into the family's fevers, spooning soup into her father's mouth and threatening to knock his head off in the same breath. She is drama
- [Oliver Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/oliver_gant.md): Oliver Gant is Eugene's father, a Welsh-born marble cutter whose magnificent voice and hammer-hurling tantrums fill the boarding house with terror and poetry. He drinks, he philanders, he weeps over his own decline, and 
- [Luke Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/luke_gant.md): Luke Gant is the Gant brother who peddles goods with a salesman's cheer and a boy's confusion, staring at his framed baby picture and feeling his own existence slip. He does not understand change or growth, and the ghost
- [Steve Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/steve_gant.md): Eugene's eldest brother, a troubled and often absent figure.
- [Margaret Leonard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/margaret_leonard.md): Margaret Leonard runs her classroom with the same stern, protective discipline she brings to her marriage to the school's principal, John Dorsey. She is drawn to Eugene's hunger for books, and her encouragement becomes o
- [John Dorsey Leonard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/john_dorsey_leonard.md): John Dorsey Leonard presides over the Altamont school with a Methodist minister's gravity and a martinet's insistence on order, his authority absolute and his manner cold. Behind the desk he is a man whose own ambitions 
- [Dr. Hugh McGuire](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/dr_mcguire.md): Dr. Hugh McGuire has seen the Gant family through its fevers, births, and griefs, dispensing diagnoses with the same unsparing honesty he applies to his own ruined health. His own life has been a long defeat, marked by d
- [Horse Hines](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/horse_hines.md): A colorful local character and undertaker in Altamont.
- [Laura James](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/laura_james.md): Laura James enters Eugene's life as a boarder at Dixieland, and their courtship is his first experience of romantic love, sweet and doomed from the start. She is gentle, vulnerable, and marked by a fragility that draws o
- [Will Pentland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/will_pentland.md): Will Pentland is the prosperous, overbearing patriarch of the Pentland family, a man who has turned shrewdness into a fortune and expects the world to defer to his judgment. He embodies the clan's contradictions: ruthles
- [Max Isaacs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/max_isaacs.md): A Jewish businessman and friend of the Gant family.
- [Daisy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/daisy.md): A young woman who works for Eliza and has a brief romance with Ben.
- [Hugh Barton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/hugh_barton.md): Hugh Barton marries into the Gant family and becomes one of its few reliable anchors, a man of sober judgment and steady nerves who drives through the night when crisis comes. He is patient with Helen's volatility and us
- [Bessie Gant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/bessie_gant.md): Oliver's sister, who visits the family.
- [Guy Doak](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/guy_doak.md): A local man and friend of the Gant family.
- [Harry Tarkinton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/harry_tarkinton.md): A local man and friend of the family.
- [Ella Corpening](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/ella_corpening.md): A young woman who boards at Eliza's.
- [Sandy Duncan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/sandy_duncan.md): A friend of Eugene's from the university.
- [Jim Lyda](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters/jim_lyda.md): A local man and friend of the Gant family.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/look_homeward_angel_se/characters