SOURCE: "Thomas Wolfe's First Triumph: 'An Angel on the Porch'," in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1989, pp. 53-62.

In the following essay, Johnston looks at the publication history and literary technique of "An Angel on the Porch, " calling it "a far more complexly crafted and important piece . . . than it has been credited with being."

In Hendersonville, NC, stands not an angel, but THE ANGEL: THE ANGEL that stood on the front porch of the Wolfe marble shop on Pack Square and which now, in some kind of mad irony, adorns the grave of the very proper wife of a Methodist minister; THE ANGEL that served as the original for the titles of Thomas Wolfe's first nationally published story and his first novel; THE ANGEL that in its description mimics the one that W. O. Gant first spied in a Baltimore shop window and that made him...