Thomas Wolfe

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.

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American writer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 North Carolina's most famous writer.

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.

Wolfe later based the character of Francis Starwick in his semi-autobiographical novel Of Time and the River (1935) on Raisbeck.

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.