Thomas Wolfe
(1900–1938)

A man of tremendous energy, appetites, and size, Thomas Wolfe poured out thousands of pages of fiction during his brief career. Unlike such Modernist writers as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who wrote concise, carefully structured prose, Wolfe wrote elaborate, loosely structured fiction that was often uneven in quality. His novels and short stories tended to be long and somewhat unpolished, yet they were filled with vivid imagery and lyrical language.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe grew up in a large, eccentric family whose members later served as models for characters in his fiction. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he developed an interest in playwriting. After a year of postgraduate study at Harvard, he moved to New York City. There he supported himself by teaching composition at New York University, while pursuing his interest in playwriting in his spare time. Unable to find success as a playwright, he turned to fiction. With the assistance of Maxwell Perkins, the leading editor of the time, Wolfe published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929. The novel, based on his experiences as a young man in Asheville, was a critical and financial success and earned him widespread recognition.

Inspired by the success of his first novel, Wolfe began working on a sequel. Once again Perkins helped him to shorten and shape the novel, which was published as Of Time and Place in 1935. The novel sold well, yet Wolfe was criticized for basing his work too closely on his own life and for his reliance on Perkins. Stung by this criticism, Wolfe switched publishers and vowed to abandon his autobiographical mode in his next novel. Unfortunately he died of a brain infection before he could finish his novel. He did, however, leave several thousand pages of manuscript in the hands of another editor, Edward Aswell, who shaped them into two more books, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).

Although he has been criticized for his lack of discipline, Wolfe was clearly a gifted writer. In his novels and short stories he displayed a strong sense of time and place, an ability to create vivid, realistic descriptions, and a profound understanding of the human condition.

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