Thomas Wolfe was a famous 20th-Century American novelist who often gets confused with Tom Wolfe, a famous 20th-Century American novelist. Thomas Wolfe came first, and was born October 3, 1900. He only lived to be 37 years old, but managed to become regarded as one of the most important writers in the Southern Renaissance in American literature. William Faulkner another Southern Renaissance creator, said after Wolfe died that he might have been the “greatest talent of their generation.” Not bad, coming from a guy who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Wolfe was traveling in the western US in 1938 when he came down with pneumonia. That worsened into tuberculosis, and he died in the hospital. Time magazine said “The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected.”
Two long novels by Wolfe, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, were published poshumously. They were “autobiographical novels,” a genre Wolfe had been one of the first to master. His debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel, which is also his best-known work, was also an autobiographical novel. The character Eugene Grant is a depiction of Wolfe, and the novel is set in a town called Altamont, which is a fictionalization of Asheville, North Carolina, where Wolfe grew up. Asheville has been in the news just in the past few days because of massive storm damage and flooding from Hurricane Helene.
The Angel in Wolfe’s novel is based on an actual artifact. His father, W.O. Wolfe was a stone carver and ran a business making gravestones. He displayed a stone angel in the window as an advertisement. A customer eventually purchased the angel, and the Thomas Wolfe angel can now be seen in the Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Wolfe wrote plays, but had trouble selling them because they were too long for most production companies. He was living in New York City at the time, and teaching English at New York University. He wasn’t a full-time faculty member; just employed there as a part-time instructor. This was in spite of his Master’s degree from Harvard. The Theatre Guild very nearly decided to produce his play Welcome to Our City, but although they ultimately did not, the episode was important for Wolfe. He met Aline Bernstein, a scene designer, and they began a years-long affair. Bernstein was twenty years older than Wolfe, and was married with two children at the time, but funded Wolfe’s writing for years in the late 1920s.
Wolfe managed to have his work banned by the German government in the years before World War II, apparently due to his story I Have Things to Tell You, published in New Republic magazine in 1936. Wolfe had visited Germany, and was disturbed by the political developments he saw there.
Maxwell Perkins was probably the preeminent book editor in the 1920s and 30s, and he edited Wolfe’s work, including Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe and Perkins had a complicated relationship; on one level they seemed to relate to one another as father and son. As an editor, Perkins cut down the length of Wolfe’s work to an extent that Wolfe had misgivings about. Wolfe tended to write long works, while Perkins shortened everything, possibly with thoughts around sales and popularity. Wolfe eventually left the publisher where Perkins worked (Scribner’s), reportedly because of Perkins’ editing. Later critics tend to agree with Wolfe. An “uncut” version of Look Homeward, Angel was published in 2000 as O Lost, and at least one reviewer thought it was far superior: “publication of the complete novel marks nothing less than the restoration of a masterpiece to the literary canon.”
Wolfe’s work has been considered both masterful and uninteresting. He is now considered a major American author, but for a couple of decades in the mid to late 20th Century his reputation far less stellar. Try either O Lost or Look Homeward, Angel (or both!) and see what you think.
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