Wolfe, Thomas (Clayton)

Wolfe, Thomas [Clayton] (1900–1938), was born and reared in Asheville, N.C. (the “Altamont, Old Catawba” of his fiction). His father, a powerful stonecutter from the North, is the prototype of Oliver Gant, and his mother, a member of a typical puritanical mountain family, is the original of the mother of Eugene Gant, whose drab life and eventual escape parallels the author's own youth. The lifelong influence of his mother is shown in his Letters to His Mother (1943).

After graduation from the University of North Carolina (1920), where he wrote and acted for the Carolina Playmakers, he studied playwriting at Harvard and received an M.A. (1922). His work included the writing of three plays, one of which, The Iron of Melancholy, was published in 1983. Another of his early plays, Mannerhouse, was published posthumously in 1948 and reissued in a more accurate text in 1985. He returned from a period abroad to teach English at New York University (1924–30) but after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) devoted his full time to writing. This strongly autobiographical novel, displaying originality and intensity as well as debts to Dreiser, Lewis, Joyce, and other contemporary novelists, was continued in a sequel, Of Time and the River (1935), incorporating a short novel, A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, previously printed in Scribner's in 1932.

A posthumous novel, The Web and the Rock (1939), has as its central character George Webber, apparently the Eugene Gant of the previous books. Despite the author's claim that “It is the most objective novel that I have written,” the first half of the book closely parallels the material of Look Homeward, Angel, and the second part serves as a sequel to Of Time and the River. The title indicates symbolically the problem of his first book: the web of experience, environment, and ancestry, in which the hero is snared; and his attempt to escape by finding the rock, which is the original strength and beauty of vision of his father. He concludes that “you can't go home again,” that you must go forward, you can't return to a dead past. The sequel, You Can't Go Home Again (1940), deals with George's life after his return to the U.S.: his continued unsatisfactory romance; his success in writing novels reminiscent of Wolfe's own; his kindly relation and later dissatisfaction with an internationally famous but disillusioned novelist and with his editor, who fatalistically accepts the sickness of civilization; his unsuccessful attempt to return to the roots of his hometown, whose morality has become shoddy during the prosperous decade of the '20s; and his horrid discovery of the destruction of the Germany he had once loved. It is the story of a man who recognizes that a corrupt society destroys each individual in it, but nevertheless believes that “the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land is yet to come.”

In addition to his lengthy fiction, Wolfe published short stories, From Death to Morning (1935), and a critical examination of his own work, The Story of a Novel (1936). Volumes that appeared after his death include The Hills Beyond (1941), an unfinished novel and some short stories, the latter separately issued as The Lost Boy (1965); two plays, Gentlemen of the Press (1942) and Mannerhouse (1948); A Western Journal …of the Great Parks Trip …1938 (1951); a collection of Letters (1956); Letters …to His Mother (1968); and his Notebooks (2 vols., 1970). “Poetical Passages” from his novels have been collected in The Face of a Nation (1939) and A Stone, a Leaf, a Door (1945), the latter arranged as verse.

Throughout his fiction there is a self‐fascination and self‐torment that endow his writing now with a lofty romantic quality, now with the prosaic quality of literal reporting of the hero's life. His intensity results in both a powerful emotional evocation and a sprawling unrestrained formlessness. His prose is sometimes highly lyrical, but there are many passages characterized by swollen, frenzied rhetoric. His books cling always to the story of his life; however, he rises above egocentricity in his mystical, patriotic belief that there is something great in America that haunts and kindles the imaginations of its young men.

Since his death various letters of his have been collected and published, e.g. two volumes in 1983 to two different women.