Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American novelist and short story writer, born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900 and dead in Baltimore in 1938. He wrote in English and belonged to a generation that watched rural America give way to the cities during the first third of the twentieth century. He matters because he combined a highly poetic, descriptive prose with autobiographical writing, which places him among the pioneers of personal fiction in the United States.

He was the youngest of eight children. His father was a stone carver who ran a gravestone business, and his mother bought property and took in boarders. After the death of one of his brothers in St. Louis during the 1904 World's Fair, his parents drifted apart, and his mother settled with him in a boarding house on Spruce Street. Wolfe studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote plays and edited the student paper, and then at Harvard under George Pierce Baker. His hopes as a playwright came to little, and by the early 1920s he had turned to the novel. For almost seven years, on and off, he taught English at New York University.

In 1926 he went to Europe and, in London, began filling account books with everything he could remember: people, streets, conversations, sounds and smells. From that mass of material came a huge manuscript, which the Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins helped reduce to a publishable book. The result was Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which drew wide attention in the United States and Britain and sold well in Germany. In Asheville, however, it caused an uproar, since many townspeople recognised themselves in its pages. His second novel, Of Time and the River (1935), brought him greater commercial success. Wolfe resisted editorial cuts for most of his career, and many of his stories, often chapters left out of his novels, appeared in magazines.

He loved Europe, though he felt that the ocean crossing kept him from knowing the continent as closely as he wished. In 1936, in Germany, he witnessed discrimination against Jews, an experience that changed how he understood the politics of the time. He fell ill with pneumonia in Seattle in 1938, and after complications he was diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis. He died in Baltimore without regaining consciousness. His legacy is considerable: William Faulkner regarded him as one of the great talents of their generation, and his influence reaches Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth and Ray Bradbury. He remains one of the essential names in modern American fiction.