Thomas Wolfe Popular Books

Thomas Wolfe Biography & Facts

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American writer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction states that "Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose longterm reputation rests largely on the impact of his first novel, Look Homeward Angel (1929), and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life." Along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the two most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon. He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered among North Carolina's most famous writers.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective. After Wolfe's death, contemporary author Faulkner said that Wolfe might have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. Faulker's endorsement, however, failed to win over mid to late 20th century literary critics and for a time Wolfe's place in the literary canon was questioned. However, 21st century academics have largely rejected this negative assessment, and both a greater appreciation of his experimentation with literary forms and a renewed interest in Wolfe's works, in particular his short fiction, has secured Wolfe's place in the literary canon with a more positive and balanced assessment. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. Early life Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922) and Julia Elizabeth Westall (1860–1945). Six of the children lived to adulthood. His father, of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, was a successful stone carver and ran a gravestone business. W. O. Wolfe's business used an angel in the window to attract customers. Thomas Wolfe "described the angel in great detail" in a short story and in Look Homeward, Angel. The angel was sold and, while there was controversy over which one was the actual angel, the location of the "Thomas Wolfe angel" was determined in 1949 to be Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina.Wolfe's mother took in boarders and was active in acquiring real estate. In 1904, she opened a boarding house in St. Louis, Missouri, for the World's Fair. While the family was in St. Louis, Wolfe's 12-year-old brother, Grover, died of typhoid fever. In 1906, Julia Wolfe bought a boarding house named "Old Kentucky Home" at nearby 48 Spruce Street in Asheville, taking up residence there with her youngest son while the rest of the family remained at the Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived in the boarding house on Spruce Street until he went to college in 1916. It is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Wolfe was closest to his brother Ben, whose early death at age 26 is chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. Julia Wolfe bought and sold many properties, eventually becoming a successful real estate speculator.Wolfe began to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) when he was 15 years old. A member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, he predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today. Aspiring to be a playwright, in 1919 Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting course. His one-act play, The Return of Buck Gavin, was performed by the newly formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role. He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry". Another of his plays, The Third Night, was performed by the Playmakers in December 1919. Wolfe was inducted into the Golden Fleece honor society.Wolfe graduated from UNC with a bachelor of arts in June 1920, and in September, entered Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Two versions of his play The Mountains were performed by Baker's 47 Workshop in 1921. While taking Baker's 47 Workshop course he befriended the playwright Kenneth Raisbeck who was Baker's graduate assistant. Wolfe later based the character of Francis Starwick in his semi-autobiographical novel Of Time and the River (1935) on Raisbeck.In 1922, Wolfe received his master's degree from Harvard. His father died in Asheville in June of that year. Wolfe studied another year with Baker, and the 47 Workshop produced his 10-scene play Welcome to Our City in May 1923. Wolfe visited New York City again in November 1923 and solicited funds for UNC, while trying to sell his plays to Broadway. In February 1924, he began teaching English as an instructor at New York University (NYU), a position he occupied periodically for almost seven years. Career Wolfe was unable to sell any of his plays after three years because of their great length. The Theatre Guild came close to producing Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, and Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage. He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1880–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. Twenty years his senior, she was married to a successful stockbroker with whom she had two children. In October 1925, she and Wolfe became lovers and remained so for five years. Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing.Wolfe returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of an autobiographical novel titled O Lost. The narrative, which evolved into Look Homeward, Angel, fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, and chronicled family, friends, and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland". His family's surname became Gant, and Wolfe called himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza. The original manuscript of O Lost was over 1,100 pages (333,000 words) long, and considerably more experimental in style than the final version of Look Homeward, Angel. It was submitted to Scribner's, where the editing was done by Maxwell Perkins, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. He cut the .... Discover the Thomas Wolfe popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thomas Wolfe books.

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  • Look Homeward, Angel synopsis, comments

    Look Homeward, Angel

    Thomas Wolfe

    Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early twentieth century.[1]Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dra...

  • The Blue And Distant Hills synopsis, comments

    The Blue And Distant Hills

    Judith Saxton

    A young girl's search for her identity and for a love that can overcome her past.Questa Adamson is stranded in Italy for the duration of the Second World War. When she finally retu...

  • Thomas Wolfe synopsis, comments

    Thomas Wolfe

    Robert Raynolds

    This is a story that no one else could tell. It tells how Thomas Wolfe and Robert Raynolds happened to meet, how they became friends, and how their friendship grew, survived a cris...

  • The Story of a Novel synopsis, comments

    The Story of a Novel

    Thomas Wolfe

    Includes a biography of the author Thomas Wolfe. The great author Thomas Wolfe gives insight in his writing and feelings. Published after the completion of his second novel, he sha...

  • The Web and The Root synopsis, comments

    The Web and The Root

    Thomas Wolfe

    Shortly before his death at a tragically young age, author Thomas Wolfe presented his editor with an epic masterwork that was subsequently published as three separate novels: You C...

  • Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others synopsis, comments

    Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others

    Robert Gottlieb

    A new collection of immersive essays from the most acclaimed editor of the second half of the twentieth centuryThis new collection from the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb feature...

  • Thomas Wolfe - Gesammelte Werke synopsis, comments

    Thomas Wolfe - Gesammelte Werke

    Thomas Wolfe

    Dieses ebook beinhaltet: Das Geweb aus Erde, Die Geschichte eines Romans,Schau heimwärts, Engel!, Von Zeit und Strom, , Keine Tür, Tod, der stolze Bruder, Am Rande des Krieges, Nur...

  • Essential Novelists - Thomas Wolfe synopsis, comments

    Essential Novelists - Thomas Wolfe

    Thomas Wolfe & August Nemo

    Welcome to the Essential Novelists book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors.For this book, the literary critic August Nemo has chosen the two most i...

  • Berlin 1936 synopsis, comments

    Berlin 1936

    Oliver Hilmes

    Die Diktatur im Pausenmodus: Stadt und Spiele im Sommer 1936Im Sommer 1936 steht Berlin ganz im Zeichen der Olympischen Spiele. Zehntausende strömen in die deutsche Hauptstadt, die...

  • Modern Classics of Fantasy synopsis, comments

    Modern Classics of Fantasy

    Gardner Dozois

    While humanity has been telling fantastic stories for millennia, fantasy fiction has only come into its own as a genre in the latter half of the twentieth century, as the works of ...

  • The Last Castle synopsis, comments

    The Last Castle

    Denise Kiernan

    A New York Times bestseller with an "engaging narrative and array of detail” (The Wall Street Journal), the “intimate and sweeping” (Raleigh News & Observer) untold, true story...

  • Mrs. Dalloway synopsis, comments

    Mrs. Dalloway

    Virginia Woolf

    Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of par...

  • Idyll Threats synopsis, comments

    Idyll Threats

    Stephanie Gayle

    In the summer of 1997, Thomas Lynch arrives as the new chief of police in Idyll, Connecticuta town where serious crimes can be counted on one hand. So no one is prepared when Cecil...

  • Sanctuary synopsis, comments

    Sanctuary

    William Faulkner

    A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at ti...

  • Cthulhu 2000 synopsis, comments

    Cthulhu 2000

    Jim Turner, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite & F. Paul Wilson

    A host of horror and fantasy’s top authors captures the spirit of supreme supernatural storyteller H. P. Lovecraft with eighteen chilling contemporary tales that would have made th...

  • Idyll Hands synopsis, comments

    Idyll Hands

    Stephanie Gayle

    In the small, sleepy town of Idyll, Connecticut, Police Chief Thomas Lynch assists police officer Michael Finnegan to uncover clues to his sister's disappearance two decades ago. C...

  • The Book of Pet Love and Loss synopsis, comments

    The Book of Pet Love and Loss

    Sara Bader

    A powerful collection of quotations by writers, leaders, and legends on the pain of losing a pet and overcoming grief.An animal’s love is deep, uncomplicated, unconditional, and fo...