Eugene Gant, “The Return of the Prodigal”
Eugene Gant is the alter ego, the fictional doppelganger of the man who created. Gant is a writer who gained fame with an autobiographical novel about his family. He is welcomed practically anywhere in the country except his hometown who almost to a person turned against him when they came across what they at least felt was the version of themselves in his novel. After an absence of seven years he is set to go back home for the first time, against the advice given him by the disembodied voice of his dead brother: “You can’t go home again.” (Also the title of Wolfe’s most famous novel.)
Arnold Pentland, "Arnold Pentland"
Eugene has a cousin named Arnold Pentland. In the story titled after him, just his introduction alone would be enough to qualify him for entrance into the Southern Gothic Hall of Fame of the Grotesque:
“The great fat obscenity of belly on the sofa stirred, the man got up abruptly, and blurting out something desperate and incoherent, thrust out a soft, grimy hand, and turned away.”
So much about Arnold is grotesque that it would almost be impossible to list them without simply cutting and pasting 75% of the text. He is certainly Wolfe’s most memorably bizarre and unpleasant creation and if it is true that he is one of the most autobiographical novelists in American history, then he is worthy of your sympathy.
The Engineer, “The Far and the Near”
This story proves that Wolfe’s controlling dictum that you can’t go home again also applies to meeting people you’ve only met from a distance. It is a sad, frustrating story of a train engineer who passes by the same house every day for twenty years where first a young woman waves at him every before she is joined by her daughter who also waves and grows into a young woman. Wanting to let them know the extent of the positive impact their smiles and waves have had on him, he is determined to meet them at last. Big mistake.
Grover Gant, “The Lost Boy”
Eugene the writer’s older brother, whose story is told in what are essentially four distinct stories told by four different narrators which are then collected together as one long story. “The Lost Boy” begins with a trip to the candy store which collapses into accusations and recriminations and an act of vengeance. The middle two sections, recounted by his sister and their mother, tells of the family’s ill-fated trip to St. Louis to see the 1904 World’s Fair. The final section details Eugene’s attempt to create fiction out the death of Grover during that visit from typhoid fever.
Dick Prosser, "The Child by Tiger"
When Dick Prosser is first introduced in the story, the reader learns that he is the “Negro man” of the Sheppertons, that he is respectful to whites, a good athlete, a great shot and beloved by the children of the community. Not terribly much longer after that, the reader learns that Prosser also has a dark side. That dark side erupts in wild stories of crazed violence screaming that Dick killed four people and then the total quickly rises to six and before the reader can even get his bearings, the lovable fella they were introduced is on the wrong side of a posse gearing up for a lynching, but finding themselves in a massacre.
