Education
He was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today. Aspiring to be a playwright, in 1919 Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting course. His one-act play, The Return of Buck Gavin, was performed by the newly-formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role. He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled The Crisis in Industry. Another of his plays, The Third Night, was performed by the Playmakers in December 1919. Wolfe was inducted into the Golden Fleece honor society.
He studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Two versions of Wolfe's play The Mountains were performed by Baker's 47 Workshop in 1921.
Career
• Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
• Of Time and the River (1935)
• From Death to Morning (1935)
• The Story of a Novel (1936)
• The Lost Boy (1937)
• The Web and the Rock (1939)
• You Can't Go Home Again (1940)
• The Hound of Darkness
• The Hills Beyond (1941)
• Mannerhouse: A Play in a Prologue and Four Acts (1948)
• A Western Journal: A Daily Log of the Great Parks Trip, June 20-July 2, 1938 (1951 by University of Pittsburgh Press)
• The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (1956)
• Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (1961)
• The Mountains: A Play in One Act; The Mountains: A Drama in Three Acts and a Prologue (1970)
• Welcome to our City: A Play in Ten Scenes (1983)
• Beyond Love and Loyalty: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Nowell edited by Richard Kennedy (1983)
• My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein (1983)
• The Party at Jack's (1995)
• The Collected Stories (Francis E. Skipp, ed.) (1987)
• To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (2000)
• O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (2000)
Essays
• God's Lonely Man (undated as an essay) Excerpt:
"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness."