His father, William Oliver Wolfe, of mixed stock--probably German, Dutch, and English--the son of Jacob Wolf and Eleanor Jane Heikus (or Heikes), had been brought up near York Springs, Pa. , and in following the trade of mason and stonecutter had moved south, adding a final "e" to his name during his travels.
But when he was seven the household began to disintegrate: his mother bought a boarding house in Asheville, "The Old Kentucky Home, " into which she moved, while her husband remained in the family home and the children were shuffled uncertainly back and forth between the two centers.
Education
Tom attended the Orange Street grade school until he was eleven, then spent the next four years at the North State Fitting School in Asheville, a private school established by Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Roberts.
A keen student and an omnivorous reader, he went to the University of North Carolina at fifteen and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1920.
At the university Wolfe's creative talents were encouraged by Prof. Edwin Greenlaw [q. v. ] and by Prof. Frederick Koch, whose Carolina Playmakers produced his plays The Return of Buck Gavin (published 1924) and The Third Night (published 1938).
Koch's enthusiasm led Wolfe to enroll at Harvard University, where he took courses in literature and practised playwriting in the famous "47 Workshop" of Prof. George Pierce Baker [q. v. ], receiving the degree of master of arts in English in 1922.
Career
Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, offers us, through the story of Eugene Gant, a recognizable narrative of his life up to the age of twenty.
Mrs. Roberts inspired Tom's interest in literature and encouraged him throughout his career.
While at Harvard he resolved to dedicate himself to the truthful presentation of life in all its fullness and complexity.
After his first year of teaching freshman composition at New York University Wolfe went abroad.
There he stayed nearly a year, traveling in England, France, and Italy, compiling travel notes and sketches, and trying unsuccessfully to write short stories.
On the ship returning to New York he met Mrs. Aline Bernstein, a stage designer who was to become an important force in his life.
(Mrs. Bernstein, as Esther Jack, is portrayed in several of Wolfe's novels.
She tells her story of their relationship in her novel, The Journey Down. )
In twenty months he produced a huge manuscript, powerful in its accumulative effect but weakened by digression and by excessive detail.
Look Homeward, Angel, published in October 1929, was well received and, as time went on, enthusiastically reviewed, although Asheville, to Wolfe's regret, looked upon it as a scandalous revelation.
His self-consciousness expanded to a national consciousness.
For his next book he planned to characterize the restlessness of the modern American and to render a sense of the vastness and variety of the American continent.
With this aim, Wolfe set off for Europe in 1930 on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
As he labored, his ideas multiplied until he had in hand a project for a series of novels.
Since the main narrative thread followed his own experiences, his memory thrust detail upon him until he expanded episodes to the size of short novels.
The first of these, A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, a brilliant study in youth and age, tied for first place in the Scribner's short novel contest in 1932.
As time went on and his material grew in length and complexity, Wolfe became overwhelmed by the bulk of his whole scheme.
Finally, late in 1933, he came to Maxwell Perkins and asked for help.
Perkins divided his manuscript into two separate books, set Wolfe to work filling the narrative gaps in the first, and together they cut and rearranged episodes during the next year.
Seeing the volume beginning to expand dangerously through Wolfe's additions, Perkins sent the manuscript to the printers.
But other parts were overwritten, wearisome in their attempt to uphold hyper-emotional tension over too many pages.
Nevertheless, the work was greeted with acclaim.
About this time Wolfe began to be known as something of a legendary figure because of his unusual appearance and habits.
He was almost six and a half feet tall and weighed well over two hundred pounds.
His appetites were enormous--for food and drink, for talk, and above all, for work.
Frequently in conflict with his time and place, he came to terms with the world in his later years, as both his books and memoirs by his friends attest.
In July 1935 Wolfe traveled west to take part in the Writer's Conference at Boulder, Colo. , where his lecture (later published as The Story of a Novel, 1936) described his ordeal with the second book and acknowledged the help Perkins had given him.
Autumn saw the publication of From Death to Morning, a collection of short stories.
He now decided to set aside his six-volume scheme temporarily while he wrote a different kind of book, a story about an innocent, gullible man discovering life's harsh truths through trial and disillusionment.
As he worked out the narrative, he gradually drew upon material he had already written until at last he had scrapped the former grandiose plan in favor of a long chronicle about a new autobiographical hero, George Webber.
At the same time he broke with Maxwell Perkins and Scribner's, partly to show his independence as an artist, partly to protest against Scribner's costly settlement of a libel suit which he had wanted to fight in court.
Although Wolfe did not live to see his new work completed, he published several sections which indicated his continued strength of passionate statement, together with new powers revealed as he developed restraint.
Most characteristic were the episodes "I Have a Thing to Tell You, " his farewell to Germany in a description of the pervasive spread of the Nazi evil; "The Child by Tiger, " an account of a crazed Negro running amok which became a meditation upon the question of evil; and "The Party at Jack's, " a story of a fire in a metropolitan apartment building which offered symbolically a criticism of American class structure.
In May 1938 Wolfe turned over a skeletal draft of his book to Harper & Brothers, his new publisher, and left for a vacation trip through the West.
After an exhausting twelve-day tour of the National Parks in July, he was stricken with pneumonia and hospitalized in Seattle.
He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville.
Despite occasional critical attacks upon his reputation, Thomas Wolfe's books have maintained continued favor in the hands of readers, largely because of the richness of his work.
As a descriptive writer he evokes vigorous response with his rhythmical lyric passages, of which two anthologies have been compiled: The Face of a Nation (1939), and A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (1946).
Thus the passionate intensity of Eugene Gant or George Webber is tempered with broad humor, which becomes more predominantly satirical in his later work.
As a poet-novelist Wolfe celebrates the American spirit with a concreteness and a vitality comparable to that of Walt Whitman.
But he is more than a national spokesman.
Organization he always found difficult.
As a result, Look Homeward, Angel stands alone among his novels as well-designed, although he learned to master his structural problems in shorter pieces.
In style many passages suffer from turgidity, from excessive length and repetition, and at times from careless phrasing.
Wolfe was on the way to the correction of these faults when his life was cut short.
He had lived only nine years after his first publication.
What is lost to us we can only conjecture from the zeal with which he always strove to bring meaning "out of the billion forms of America, out of the savage violence and the dense complexity of all its swarming life. "
Lib.
and interviews with Mabel Wolfe Wheaton and other relatives and friends.
See also the following published work: Wolfe's own The Story of a Novel (1936); Thomas Wolfe's Letters to His Mother (1943); Elizabeth Nowell, ed. , Letters of Thomas Wolfe (1956); "Writing Is My Life" (Letters to Mrs. J. M. Roberts), Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1946, Jan. , Feb. 1947; George W. McCoy, "Asheville and Thomas Wolfe, " N. C. Hist.
Rev. , Apr. 1953; and the excellent collection of articles, ed.
by Richard Walser, The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe (1953).
The best critical studies are Herbert Muller, Thomas Wolfe (1947), and Louis Rubin, Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth (1955). ]
Personality
But he was highly emotional--one moment elated, the next despondent; now full of good will, soon overcome with suspicion or anger.
Interests
Music & Bands
Out of the huge manuscript which Wolfe left behind, Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper's, fashioned three books: The Web and the Rock (1939), the story of George Webber's growing up and of his tumultuous love affair with Esther Jack in New York; You Can't Go Home Again (1940), the further adventures of George Webber in finding that one cannot escape change and its responsibilities by looking back "to childhood, to romantic love, or to a young man's dreams of glory and fame"; and The Hills Beyond (1941), Wolfe's incomplete cycle of legends about Webber's mountain kinsmen.
Connections
Writing to his mother he declared, "I will go to the ends of the earth to find it, to understand it, I will know this country when I am through as I know the palm of my hand, and I will put it on paper and make it true and beautiful. "
As egoistic as a child, he had all the charm of the child's naïveté and quick, disarming affection.
Sister:
W.
Among his best-known characters are W. O. Gant and Eliza Gant, fictional interpretations of his parents; Helen Gant, of his sister Mabel; Professor Hatcher, of George Pierce Baker; Foxhall Edwards, of Maxwell Perkins; Lloyd McHarg, of Sinclair Lewis.
parents:
W.
Among his best-known characters are W. O. Gant and Eliza Gant, fictional interpretations of his parents; Helen Gant, of his sister Mabel; Professor Hatcher, of George Pierce Baker; Foxhall Edwards, of Maxwell Perkins; Lloyd McHarg, of Sinclair Lewis.
married:
Westall
He married twice without offspring before his third marriage to Julia Elizabeth Westall, a North Carolina woman of Scotch-Irish and English descent, whose forebears had lived in the western part of the state since the first Westall settled there in the late eighteenth century.
Grandfather:
Westall
Thomas Wolfe was named for his grandfather, Thomas Casey Westall, who together with brothers and sons had served in the Confederate Army.
children:
,
Wolfe, Thomas Clayton, (Oct. 3, 1900 - Sept. 15, 1938), North Carolina 1900 1938 Male Novelist novelist, was born in Asheville, N. C., the youngest of eight children, of whom one died in infancy.
marriage:
Westall
He married twice without offspring before his third marriage to Julia Elizabeth Westall, a North Carolina woman of Scotch-Irish and English descent, whose forebears had lived in the western part of the state since the first Westall settled there in the late eighteenth century.
