Thomas Wolfe

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Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an important American novelist of the 20th century. He wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works, and novel fragments. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodical, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written during the Great Depression, depict the variety and diversity of American culture.

Biography

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina where his mother was a successful real estate speculator and his father was a tombstone carver. He studied at the University of North Carolina, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity. Also, he was a member of the UNC Dialectic Society, acted with the Carolina Playmakers, and received his Masters in playwriting at Harvard University. Unable to sell any of his plays, Wolfe found his writing style was more suited to fiction than to the stage. He took a temporary job teaching at New York University, but left after a year for Europe to continue writing. On his return voyage in 1925, he met the married Aline Bernstein who was twenty years his senior. They soon began a turbulent and sometimes combative affair. He dedicated his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, to Bernstein. Soon after its publication, he fled to Europe once more, thereby ending his affair. Look Homeward, Angel is the edited version of Wolfe's original novel O Lost, which was over a hundred pages longer and considerably more experimental in character. The editing was done by Maxwell Perkins, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Initially, Wolfe was grateful for the extreme editing conditions he worked under with Perkins at Scribner's. However, the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Perkins, after considering the commercial possibilities of releasing the book in full, opted to cut it down extremely and to create a single, best-seller-sized volume, which would be called Of Time and the River.

The painful editing led Wolfe to abandon Perkins and Scribner's, and to switch publishers to Harper and Row. However, on a 1937 trip to the West, Wolfe was stricken with pneumonia. Complications arose, and he eventually was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain. He was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, but the attempt at a life-saving operation revealed the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. He died three days later, never regaining consciousness.

Despite his disagreements with Perkins and Scribner's and Sons, on his deathbed Wolfe wrote a deeply moving letter to Perkins. In the letter, he acknowledged that Perkins had helped to realize his work and had made his labors possible. In closing he wrote, "Let's think of the day we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge together, and the book had been published, and the first reviews were coming in, and the world with all its glory and beauty lay before us, and we were happy. That's the way I think of you now. I've met the dark man, and I don't think I was too afraid of him. But I know I have to go and I wanted you to get this before that happened."

After his death, two further novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again were published posthumously, editorially mined out of the October Fair manuscript by Edward Aswell of Harper and Row. He was buried in Asheville, NC beside another famous writer, O. Henry.

Recently, O Lost, the original "author's cut" of Look Homeward, Angel, has been reconstructed by Matthew Bruccoli and published. Unfortunately, the October Fair manuscript was so scattered among editors during their various operations upon it, that it cannot be reconstructed, and readers will never know what Wolfe intended for that immense work.

After Wolfe's death, William Faulkner, considered by many to be the best writer of the Lost Generation-era, said that Wolfe was his generation's best writer; Faulkner listed himself as second. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac, and he remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature.

Trivia

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This article has been tagged since June 2007.

When he was 15 years old, Thomas Wolfe was a batboy for the Asheville Tourists minor league baseball club.[1]
Mrs. Wolfe chose to keep Tom in very long (and very effeminate) curls while a boy. After a great deal of teasing from fellow classmates, he eventually caught lice during an outbreak at school when he was eight years old, forcing his mother to shave off his boyish locks.
The Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver uses the reference of "God's Lonely Man," an essay written by Thomas Wolfe.
The most popular song by Serbian rock/hard rock band Riblja Čorba, Pogledaj dom svoj, anđele, released on their 1985 album Istina ("Thruth"), is named by the novel Look Homeward, Angel.

Bibliography

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
Of Time and the River (1935)
From Death to Morning (1935)
The Story of a Novel (1936)
The Web and the Rock (1939)
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)
The Hills Beyond (1941)
A Western Journal: A Daily Log of the Great Parks Trip, June 20-July 2, 1938 (1951)
Letters (1956)
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)
Mannerhouse: A Play in a Prologue and Four Acts (1985)
The Collected Stories (Francis E. Skipp, ed.) (1987)

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Thomas Wolfe

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