Thomas Wolfe

American · 1900 to 1938

Born Thomas Clayton Wolfe on October 3, 1900, in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of a hard-drinking Pennsylvania Dutch stonecutter whose carved marble angel stood in the window of his gravestone shop, and a real-estate-trading mother who in 1906 bought the boarding house at 48 Spruce Street where the family was thereafter divided. He entered the University of North Carolina at fifteen, edited The Daily Tar Heel, wrote one-act plays for the Carolina Playmakers, and went on to Harvard in 1920 to study under George Pierce Baker in his 47 Workshop. From 1924 he taught English intermittently at NYU. On a return voyage from Europe in 1925 he met Aline Bernstein, a Theatre Guild scene designer twenty years his senior, who became his lover and his patron for five turbulent years. The 333,000-word manuscript O Lost was cut by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's into Look Homeward, Angel (1929), an autobiographical novel renaming Asheville Altamont and the family Gant. The book sold strongly and provoked outrage among the two hundred locals who recognised themselves; Wolfe stayed away from Asheville for eight years. Of Time and the River (1935), again severely cut by Perkins, made the citizens angrier now for being left out. He broke with Perkins, moved to Harper & Brothers under Edward Aswell, and continued writing at full velocity. In Seattle in 1938 he caught pneumonia, then miliary tuberculosis spread to his brain; he was taken to Johns Hopkins, where an operation revealed the disease was beyond reach. He died on September 15, 1938, in Baltimore, eighteen days before his thirty-eighth birthday, and was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville beside his parents.