American · 1900–1938
Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. He studied at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, and taught English at New York University. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), drew on his Asheville family and childhood and made his name. He followed it with Of Time and the River (1935), working closely with the editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. After a break with Perkins he moved to Harper and Brothers. Wolfe wrote in long, lyrical, autobiographical prose, and his novels run to enormous length. He died of tuberculosis of the brain in Baltimore in 1938, aged 37. The posthumous novels The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were assembled from his manuscripts by his editor Edward Aswell. Wolfe influenced later American writers, including Jack Kerouac, who admired his expansive style. His reputation rests on his raw emotional force and on his portrait of American youth and longing.