Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American writer, whose novels had an enormous impact on the readers of his own generation.

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on October 3, 1900, and educated at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. After a brief sojourn abroad, he served from 1924 to 1930 as an English instructor at New York University in New York City. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), was an immediate success, enabling Wolfe to devote himself entirely to writing. Strongly autobiographical in content and marked by an almost overwhelming emotional intensity, Look Homeward, Angel exhibits the stylistic influence of the American novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and of the Irish writer James Joyce. A sequel, Of Time and the River, was published in 1935. The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) completed Wolfe's cycle of autobiographical novels. The central theme of the cycle is the search by an idealistic young man for enduring values. Despite the corruption he finds in the society around him, he retains a nostalgic, poetic faith in the essential goodness of the American people and the greatness of their land. Wolfe's writing is characterized by a fervent lyricism and expansiveness which has been compared to that of the American poet Walt Whitman. Wolfe wrote so unrestrainedly and at such great length that his works had to be cut drastically by his editor Maxwell Perkins. Although they continued to be read and studied, they were not really popular with young people of the post-World War II era.

Wolfe's other works include From Death to Morning (1935), a collection of short stories; The Story of a Novel (1936), a study of his own methods of composition; The Hills Beyond (1941), containing an incomplete novel and shorter pieces; Western Journal (1951); and Writing and Living (1964).

Wolfe died of pneumonia on September 15, 1938, in Baltimore, Maryland.