Wolfe's style has often been called "romantic," both because of the emotional extremes of its sprawling style and because of the American tradition it is not entirely outside. American writers like Walt Whitman, who among other achievements captured a broad sense of American life, were very influential over Wolfe's authorial intentions. Wolfe frequently wrote that he loved America and wished to represent its "grandness"; part of this process in Look Homeward, Angel consisted of melding traditional American and modern European techniques, similar to his melding some of their important themes (discussed above).

This results in a unique and varied style. Often Wolfe goes on at great length in what seems to be a "stream of consciousness" style, something present in modernist writers such as James Joyce, and sometimes he exhibits some of the frankness about sexuality that is common in modernist style. But his work simultaneously reads like...