Finding the Lost Country

Wolfe’s elegiac words were an epiphany, he felt an energy go through him that was electrifying. He knew at that moment that it was his destiny to be a writer.
He continued to read until his mother yelled at him to blow out the lamp. Excitement coursed through him as he lay awake the entire night waiting for the first light so he could continue reading. If it is possible that a book can change your life, that book changed his. It sharpened everything around him and brought his life into focus and pointed it toward a purpose; Wolfe’s prose set the direction for his life and he never wavered.
William knew from that moment that he wanted to be a writer. To him it was an exalted calling, it was the noblest thing you could do. He was stunned by the power of Wolfe’s language. The book was intensely alive. The characters walked and talked and lived their lives and they would not abide the page. The sense of utter “October aloneness” expressed in Wolfe’s rhapsodic prosody stirred him in his depths. The death of Ben Gant was the most powerful thing he had ever read. Wolfe took the lives of ordinary people and made them transcendent.
William immediately set out to learn to write with the startling insight and poetic language that Wolfe had mastered. That was what he thought then and years later it never changed. Wolfe’s novel raised a curtain on the power of the word. It articulated William’s compulsion to write and made it possible to believe that the stuff of life could, by some strange alchemy, be transmuted on the page. William was totally absorbed in Wolfe’s fiction. He felt Wolfe whispering to him in the night, Wolfe’s soaring incantatory rhetoric was like a narcotic. He was transfixed by Wolfe’s language; it was the first time he realized that language can transport you, can take you outside yourself and that the sum of words can mean far more than the individual words alone. Suddenly words like “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door” took on a meaning he didn’t know could exist, a meaning he wanted to find. Wolfe’s landscape was more tangible to William than his own backyard and the characters were as real as the people in his day-to-day life.
As soon as he read the 544 pages of Look Homeward, Angel, William went back to the beginning and started over again, and before his fourteenth birthday, he read it again from cover to cover. He found in Eugene Gant a version of himself. William fell in love with the experience of the words, their rhythm, their cadence, their flow. Those feelings drove him to an addiction to the masterworks of Southern literature. When he set his own pen to paper, he wanted nothing more than to match them, word for word, in power and beauty. He was stunned by the power inherent in language and never got over it. William’s discovery of Wolfe’s evocative and poetic prose marked the beginning of his writing career.
William Gay was born to be a writer. For as long as he could remember he was fascinated by the written word and wanted nothing other than to write. He faced incredible odds but there was simply nothing else that he wanted to do and nothing else that he would do. From that time on William did whatever he had to do to figure out how to create prose that embodied the aesthetic intensity he first encountered in the language of Thomas Wolfe.