Thomas Clayton Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938) was an American novelist of prodigious talent and equally formidable failings. His highly autobiographical novels are notable for fervent energy, uninhibited emotion, and grandly rhetorical language.

Thomas Wolfe achieved critical acclaim for his unabashed romanticism and visionary faith in the inherent greatness of America and the heroism of its people. He possessed an extraordinary ability for portraiture and a gift for visual detail and sensory impressions, but his brilliance is often diminished in a diffuse sea of inflated irrelevancies and ranting incantations and exhortations. Modern critics have grown less infatuated with his prose and become more aware of the lack of thematic focus, structural cohesion, and controlling artistic intelligence in even his most disciplined work.

The most striking irony in Wolfe's work is that despite his spontaneous emotionalism there is an absence of compassion for any character other than his self-identifying protagonist, and despite his mystic exaltation of sex there is little credible sexuality and even less love.

Lonely Childhood

Wolfe was born on Oct. 3, 1900, in Asheville, N.C. His mother had been a schoolteacher before marrying William O. Wolfe, a stonecutter and a man of towering assertiveness and drive. After the parents split up, Wolfe's lonely childhood was spent shuttling between the two. The death of his older brother Ben, whom he idolized, left an emotional scar from which he never recovered.

After an outstanding scholastic record, at the age of 15 Wolfe was admitted to the University of North Carolina, where he became active in various publications and theater groups. Two plays were produced: The Return of Buck Gavin (published 1924) and The Third Night (1938). Upon graduation the embryonic author continued at Harvard University, eventually earning a master of arts degree. His involvement with the famous Playwright Workshop led to Welcome to Our City (produced at Harvard, 1923) and to work on Mannerhouse (published 1948), concerning the disintegration of a southern family. His professors' enthusiasm encouraged Wolfe to move to New York in 1923 to seek success in the theater. Failure forced him to accept a position as English instructor at New York University. In 1924 in Europe he met Aline Bernstein, a married mother of two, 16 years his senior, with whom he had a brief but intense love affair.

Look Homeward, Angel

In 1926 Wolfe began work on an enormous novel which would explore and explain "the strange and bitter magic of life." After some 20 months of furious writing, Wolfe left the huge, sprawling manuscript with Maxwell Perkins, editor of Scribner's. Though impressed with the author's genius, Perkins would not publish the novel until it was considerably revised and drastically cut. After a great deal of reworking and editing, Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929. Opening with a 90-page account of the early lives of his father and mother, the novel is a thinly disguised autobiographical record of the author's early years in the person of Eugene Gant.

In contrast to the critics' instant praise, Wolfe earned the hostility of many relatives and friends who easily recognized themselves in the novel. Though recent critical judgment of the work has been tempered by the recognition of its romantic and at times adolescent pretentiousness, Look Homeward, Angel contains vigorous prose and sequences of unquestionable power, such as the chilling conversation between Eugene and the ghost of his brother Ben, and the graphic description of his father's struggle against cancer. It is Wolfe's major contribution to American literature.

Wolfe resigned from New York University in 1930 and returned to Europe for a year on a fellowship. He had in mind a vast novel of several volumes which would range in time from the Civil War to the present and would replace Eugene Gant with a less autobiographical protagonist. After nearly five years of grappling with this conception—while living in extreme loneliness and near poverty in Brooklyn Heights, New York City—Wolfe recognized his inability to achieve a structural unity for the work.

Of Time and the River

Perkins insisted that Wolfe return to his previous autobiographical mode. Despite Wolfe's bitter protestations, a mammoth, haphazardly organized novel, Of Time and the River, appeared in 1935. Here the story of Eugene Gant continues, from his journey to Harvard University, through his period of personal turmoil in Europe, including an unhappy love affair, concluding with his return to the United States. The work's two outstanding sections are a vivid description of Eugene's ride to Boston and the horrifyingly effective account of the death of Gant's father.

Alternating between hysterical affirmation and maudlin self-pity, the novel's young protagonist is a rather unpleasant individual whose heroic conception of himself is never sustained by objective facts. Most of the other characters are sketchily drawn, with the exception of the friend Starwick, who, like Eugene, is endowed with a tragic dimension, whose basis is never made clear. Eugene's relationship with Starwick and his horror at discovering his friend's homosexuality are psychologically ambiguous and absurdly melodramatic. The study maintains a strange effectiveness, however, because of its frequent insights into the abyss of human loneliness and the sterility of self-love.

Several months after publication of Of Time and the River, Perkins collected several short stories and sketches extracted from Wolfe's earlier uncompleted novel. Under the title From Death to Morning, the uneven work was severely attacked by critics, although it included two of Wolfe's finest pieces of controlled narration—"Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" and "Death the Proud Brother." In 1936 Wolfe terminated his association with Perkins, largely to quell the rumor that the editor had acted as a near collaborator in the creation of his fiction, and signed with Edward C. Aswell, editor of Harper and Brothers.

Posthumous Publications

Forgiven by his family and friends in North Carolina, for the first time in many years Wolfe returned home, where he spent several months writing and discovering that "you can't go home again." He presented a voluminous manuscript to Aswell, the working outlines for a new series of novels. On vacation in the West, Wolfe suddenly contracted pneumonia, which activated a tubercular condition. He died on Sept. 15, 1938, in Baltimore.

From the eight-foot pile of manuscript left him, Aswell compiled two novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), and a volume of short stories, The Hills Beyond (1941). The novels are no less autobiographical than Wolfe's earlier ones, and despite some impressive prose in The Web and the Rock, there is no indication that Wolfe had begun to achieve mastery of his medium or to discover fresh thematic material. Wolfe's other posthumous writings include Letters to His Mother (1943), Western Journal (1951), and Letters (1956).

Further Reading

The only biography of Wolfe is Andrew Turnbull, Thomas Wolfe (1968). An intimate but adulatory view emerges from the reminiscences of Robert Raynolds, Thomas Wolfe: Memoir of a Friendship (1965). Critical studies are Pamela Hansford Johnson, Thomas Wolfe (1947); Herbert J. Muller, Thomas Wolfe (1947); Louis D. Rubin, Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth (1953); Richard G. Walser, Thomas Wolfe (1961); and Bruce R. McElderry, Thomas Wolfe (1964).

Collections of critical opinion on Wolfe are Richard G. Walser, ed., The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe: Biographical and Critical Selections (1953), and Thomas Clark Pollock and Oscar Cargill, eds., Thomas Wolfe at Washington Square (1954). For briefer discussions see the relevant sections in Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction, 1920-1940 (1941); Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel between Two Wars (1942); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942); Edwin B. Burgum, The Novel and the World's Dilemma (1947); and Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950 (1951). □

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.

Thomas Clayton Wolfe 1900–1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammoth novels, which, while highly autobiographical, present a sweeping picture of American life. He was the son of William Oliver Wolfe, a stonecutter, and Julia Westall Wolfe, a boardinghouse keeper and speculator in real estate. Wolfe's early, insistent efforts to become a playwright met with frustration and failure. In 1924 he became an instructor at New York Univ., teaching there until 1930; thereafter he wrote mostly in New York City or abroad. During the late 1920s he was closely associated with Aline Bernstein (the "Esther Jack" of his novels), a noted theatrical designer, who was a major influence in his adult life.

In 1929, under the rigorous editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins, he published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. After the appearance of its sequel, Of Time and the River (1935), he broke with Perkins and signed a contract with Harper & Brothers, with Edward Aswell as his editor. After Wolfe died at 38 from complications following pneumonia, Aswell arranged from the material left at Wolfe's death two novels— The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940)—and a volume of stories and fragments, The Hills Beyond (1941). Wolfe's other publications include From Death to Morning (1935), a collection of short stories; and The Story of a Novel (1936), a record of how he wrote his second book.

Wolfe's works compose a picture, left somewhat incomplete by his premature death. They describe the life of a youth from the rural South through his education to his career in New York City as a teacher and writer. Wolfe's major theme was almost always himself—his own inner and outer existence—his gropings, his pain, his self-discovery, and his endless search for an enduring faith. He was obsessed by memory, time, and location, and his novels convey a brilliant sense of place. His writing is characterized by a lyrical and dramatic intensity, by the weaving and reweaving of a web of sensuous images, and by rhapsodic incantations.

Bibliography: See his letters, ed. by E. Nowell (1956); his letters to A. Bernstein, ed. by S. Stutman (1983); To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (2000), ed. by M. J. Bruccoli and P. Bucker; O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (2000), a restored version of Look Homeward Angel, ed. by A. and M. J. Bruccoli; biographies by A. Turnbull (1967), N. F. Austin (1968), and D. H. Donald (1987); studies by R. S. Kennedy (1962), L. Field (1988), and J. L. Idol, Jr. (1987).

Wolfe, Thomas Clayton (1900–38), American novelist, made his name with his vast autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which describes the adolescence of Eugene Gant; this was followed by a sequel, Of Time and the River (1935), and various posthumous works, which include The Web and the Rock (1939) and its sequel You Can't Go Home Again (1940). Wolfe's undisciplined work owed much in its published form to editorial assistance, but its emotional power won many readers.

Wolfe, Thomas Clayton (1900–38) US writer. His reputation rests on his sequence of four sprawling autobiographical novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can't Go Home Again (1940). His reputation rests on his sequence of four sprawling autobiographical novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).