Wolfe, Thomas Clayton 1900-38
US novelist

He was born in Asheville, North Carolina. His father, an alcoholic, was a skilled stonecutter who sculpted tombstones for a living, and his mother left in 1906 to run a boarding-house. He was educated at North Carolina and Harvard universities. After an abortive start as a playwright, in 1925 he embarked on a turbulent affair with Mrs Aline Bernstein, a maternal figure who did much to encourage his writing, particularly his first novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which was patently autobiographical. The massive, shapeless manuscript of Of Time and the River (1935), its sequel, was honed into shape by Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's. Both these novels feature Eugene Gant, Wolfe's alter ego. The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were published posthumously. Prolix, careless, bombastic and over-ambitious, he nevertheless wrote vividly of people and places. Some assert that his best work is to be found in the stories in From Death to Morning (1935). His Letters were published in 1956.

Bibliography: C H Holman, Thomas Wolfe (1960)