Thomas Wolfe
1 book in the library
Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was an American novelist, born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest child of a stonecutter and of a mother who ran a boarding house in the town. He entered the University of North Carolina at fifteen, studied playwriting at Harvard, and taught English at New York University while trying without success to have his plays produced. With the support of the stage designer Aline Bernstein he wrote an enormous autobiographical novel, which the editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s helped him cut and shape into Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Its frank portraits of recognisable people angered many in Asheville. Of Time and the River followed in 1935. Wolfe died of tuberculosis of the brain in Baltimore in 1938, just before his thirty-eighth birthday, and two more novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, were assembled from his manuscripts after his death.
