Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe:Photo by Carl Van Vechten

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a 20th century American novelist and short story writer. He is known for his autobiographical fiction written in highly original, impressionistic prose. His books, written during the Great Depression, depict the variety and diversity of American culture during a dark time.

In his personal life, the author was known by friends as an enthusiastic yet lonesome man, who often desired more than he was able to attain in happiness, health, and love. He died unmarried, young, and without having realized his full potential as an artist. lasting testament to his zeal is the confection of his literary output, primarily his four novels: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).

Wolfe wrote novels similar to the way he lived: with a natural unconventionality, drenched in the wonder of existence, and with a voice that's mission seemed to be to express everything that the heart could feel. A favorite writer of the early twentieth century, his fervor for the potential of a life well lived influenced a plethora of readers worldwide to appreciate existence as something extraordinary.

Biography

Wolfe was born in the mountain resort town Asheville, North Carolina, the last born of a large middle-class family. His mother, Julia E. Wolfe, was a successful real estate speculator, and his father, William Oliver Wolfe, was a tombstone maker. His ancestors, on his father's side, were German-Dutch-English farmers who had settled in Pennsylvania, and his mother was a third-generation North Carolinian of Scot-Irish-English stock. His parents married in 1885, giving birth to eight children of whom only six survived into adulthood. Mr. Wolfe's alcoholism eventually divided the couple in 1906, and young Thomas was the only child to go into the custody of his mother. During his childhood, the family member he felt closest to was his brother, Benjamin. Later in his work, Thomas would often portray members of his family with great spirit and good-humored satire.

From the age of eleven, Wolfe attended a local private school from which he would graduate shortly before he turned 16. On September 12, 1916, he began to go to school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and became editor of the school's newspaper. At Chapel Hill, Thomas developed an ambition for the theater through his work with the UNC Dialectic Society as well as the Carolina Playmakers.

When Wolfe graduated, at age twenty, he went to Harvard to study playwrighting under Professor George Pierce Baker in his renowned 47 Workshop. The aspiring dramatist's first play at Harvard was "The Mountains", a folk play about North Carolina. He received his Master of Arts Degree in Literature in two years, but stayed one year extra to further hone his skills as a playwright. Wolfe would later satirize the pretentiousness of Harvard life, and the 47 Workshop in particular, in his piece, "Of Time and the River."

Though Wolfe did not lack in talents, ultimately his personal style and temperament were not well suited to the theater, and he was unsuccessful in getting his plays produced after graduating from Harvard. He took work as an English instructor at New York University in 1924. He would teach there off and on until 1930, initially departing from the school after his first year there to work on his personal writing overseas in Europe. On his return voyage in 1925, he met the married Aline Bernstein, a successful set and costume designer in the New York theater, who was twenty years his senior. Thus began their turbulent affair which would last the next five years.

In June of 1926, Mrs. Bernstein and Wolfe vacationed in England, where Thomas began to write what would become his breakthrough work, the novel: Look Homeward, Angel. In the late fall of 1928, while in Vienna on yet another trip to Europe, Wolfe received a letter from Maxwell E. Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s and Sons, asking him to meet with him in New York to discuss his book. Perkins had also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and saw in Wolfe potential equal to theirs. The following year, in October, the book was completed and published by Scribner's, with a dedication to Mrs. Bernstein for her artistic, emotional, and financial support.

Look Homeward created an uproar in the author's hometown, as over 200 characters in the novel were easily identifiable citizens of Asheville. The book was banned from the public library and people were discouraged to read it. Death threats were even sent to Wolfe, and it was not until 1937 that he would feel safe enough to return to the town.

Around this time, Thomas' affair with Bernstein had reached a breaking point. In March of 1930 the author was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to travel to Europe and stay there for the next year, also providing the opportunity to finally end his relationship with Aline. When he returned to New York in February of 1931, he rented an apartment in Brooklyn and worked to complete his second book.

Initially, Wolfe had been grateful for the extreme editing conditions he had worked under with Perkins, who had become almost like a father to him. However, with his second offering, the multi-volume epic originally titled The October Fair, Wolfe became disgruntled. Perkins cut the piece down dramatically to create a single, bestseller-sized volume, which would be called Of Time and the River. The young author would stick it out at Scribner's for two more of his publications, From Death to Morning (1935) and The Story of a Novel (1936), but the painful editing process, and his own fears that he was becoming too dependent on Perkins, caused him to abandon his relationship with Scribner's in 1937 and switch to Harper and Row under the editorship of Edward Aswell.

Soon after, on a pleasure trip to the state of Washington with friends, Wolfe came down with pneumonia. Complications continued and in September of 1938 he was admitted to John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. There, Dr. Walter Dandy, the foremost brain surgeon in the country at that time, diagnosed Wolfe with tuberculosis of the brain. An attempt to operate on September 12th revealed that the entire right side of the patient's brain was overrun by the disease, and by this point it was too late for anything to be done. Three days later, on September 15th, 1938, never having regained consciousness, Thomas Wolfe died at the age of 37. He was interred at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville beside another famous writer, O. Henry.

Despite his disagreements with Perkins and Scribner's and Sons, Wolfe, on his deathbed, wrote a moving letter to his former editor. In the message, 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."

Major Works and Style

Style

Perhaps the most autobiographical of America's major novelists of the time, Wolfe's highly literary and sentimental style could be overwhelming to readers more inclined toward traditional prose. His critics say his writing was tedious, long-winded, and self-indulged; while his admirers refer to it as intensely introspective, highly original poetic prose. Said fellow Scribner's author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings:

"When Wolfe hits it right with his gorgeous style, the effect is tremendously satisfying, emotionally like a symphony at its best.... When a little of the torment has expended itself, you will have the greatest artist America has ever produced."

Though his opulent style has not dated well, it was considered very relevant by the generation that came of age in the middle decades of the century. It was Thomas Wolfe's writing that inspired the young Jack Kerouac to become an author, an influence most obvious in Kerouac's first novel, "The Town and the City."

Works

Look Homeward, Angel is Wolfe's first novel. Published in 1929 by Scribner's, it is heavily autobiographical, and Wolfe uses the main character, Eugene Gant, as a stand-in for himself. It shows his maturing from birth to the age of eighteen in the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, which many believe to be a not-so-subtle mirror of his hometown, Asheville, North Carolina. Many of the characters of Look Homeward, Angel were also strongly based on real people from Asheville, and were often not portrayed in a pleasing manner. This resulted in a certain estrangement between Wolfe and his hometown, and it is speculated that this formed some of the basis for his later work, You Can't Go Home Again.

The title comes from the poem "Lycidas" by John Milton.

Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:

And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth. (163-164)

Of Time and the River, published on March 8, 1935 by Scribner's, is the sequel to "Look Homeward, Angel" and was an even greater success. The book chronicles the maturation of the autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process as Gant gradually embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a neccessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, "[Of Time and Life] is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life."

You Can't Go Home Again (1940) was one of two novels published posthumously from the October Fair manuscript. The last of Thomas Wolfe's novels, it tells the story of George Webber, who after having written a successful novel about his family and hometown, returns to find that town shaken by outrage and hatred over the truths exposed in the book. He begins a search for his own identity that takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl: to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates, and Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow.

Legacy

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.

Two novels by Wolfe, 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.

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.

The Thomas Wolfe Society was formed in 1979, responsible for various publications as well as an annual meeting held in different cities significant to Wolfe (Asheville, New York City, Paris).

All of Wolfe's manuscripts are housed at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Wolfe scholars continue to use these manuscripts to produce such works as the complete edition of The Party at Jack's, published in 1995.

Bibliography

• Look Homeward, Angel (1929) ISBN 0743297318
• Of Time and the River (1935) ISBN 0684867850
• From Death to Morning (1935)
• The Story of a Novel (1936)
• The Web and the Rock (1939) ISBN 0060913207
• You Can't Go Home Again (1940) ISBN 0060930055
• 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)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Donald, David Herbert. 1987. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 0316189529
• Wolfe, Thomas; Perkins, Maxwell; Bruccoli, Matthew Josheph; Bucker, Park. To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2000. ISBN 1570033552.
• Wolfe, Thomas, Margaret Roberts, and Ted Mitchell. 2007. Windows of the Heart: The Correspondence of Thomas Wolfe and Margaret Roberts. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 9781570036743
• Mauldin, Joanne Marshall. Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 2007. ISBN 1572334940.
• Mitchell, Ted. Thomas Wolfe: An Illustrated Biography. Pegasus Books, New York, 2007. ISBN 1933648104

External links

• "Home Page", The Thomas Wolfe Website, Retrieved July 15, 2007.
• "Home Page", Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Retrieved July 15, 2007.
• "The Thomas Wolfe Collection", UNC University Libraries, Retrieved July 15, 2007.
• "Audio Interview with Duane Schneider about Thomas Wolfe", Wired for Books, Retrieved July 15, 2007.
• "Thomas Wolfe's Gravesite", Find A Grave, Retrieved July 15, 2007.
• Bloom, Harold. 1987. Passionate Beholder of America in Trouble. The New York Times. Retrieved August 4, 2007.
• Windows of the Heart SC.edu. Retrieved August 4, 2007.

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