Thomas Wolfe Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born in 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, to William Oliver Wolfe, a stonecutter and monument dealer, and Julia Westall Wolfe, a resourceful boardinghouse keeper. The tension between his fathers rootedness among gravestones and his mothers restless enterprise became a defining polarity in his imagination. Growing up in a bustling boardinghouse filled with transients, voices, and dramas, he absorbed the textures of speech and character that would later animate his fiction. At the University of North Carolina, he studied under teachers who encouraged his ambition, wrote for campus publications, and found his footing as a dramatist with the Carolina Playmakers, the theater group guided by Frederick Koch. After graduating, he continued his training at Harvard, where he studied playwriting in George Pierce Bakers famed workshop, absorbing lessons about scene, rhythm, and structure even as his impulse moved toward the expansive canvases of the novel.

Apprenticeship and the Turn to Fiction
Wolfe initially hoped to become a playwright, and he tried to place scripts in a commercial theater that often found his work too long and undisciplined for the stage. He taught at New York University to support himself while he wrote, revising manuscripts in rented rooms and boardinghouses and composing late into the night. Gradually he turned from the confines of drama to narrative prose, pouring his experience and memory into an enormous manuscript he called O Lost. When the editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribners Sons read the pages, he recognized a raw, prodigious talent and undertook the demanding work of shaping the book for publication. Their collaboration was exacting and intimate, and it set a pattern for Wolles career: immense drafts brought within the compass of a published text by an editorial ally.

Look Homeward, Angel and Sudden Fame
In 1929 Scribners published Look Homeward, Angel, a novel distilled from O Lost that transformed the material of his Asheville youth into art. The book was acclaimed for its fervor, its lyrical flights, and its cornucopia of character. It also provoked controversy at home, as neighbors recognized themselves and resented the exposure; for a time he felt estranged from Asheville. Yet the novel placed him in the first rank of young American writers. His editor Perkins, already steward to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, championed Wolfe with the same persistence, though Wolfe was very different in method and temperament from those contemporaries. The artist Aline Bernstein, a sophisticated set designer whom Wolfe met in New York, became an important companion and supporter during these early years; their relationship, complex and passionate, fed into his fiction and his sense of the personal costs of art.

Of Time and the River and the Making of a Career
Wolfe continued to travel, read voraciously, and write in torrents. He spent time in Europe, observing cities and landscapes that widened his sense of Americas place in the world. Out of these experiences and his mounting ambition came Of Time and the River, published in 1935 after another marathon of drafting and editing with Perkins. The book extended his autobiographical portrait of the young artist into an exploration of exile, apprenticeship, and return. Critics divided over its sprawl, but many recognized a singular voice reaching for the totality of American life. He found himself at the center of literary attention, praised and scolded in equal measure for his abundance.

Break with Scribners and New Editorial Alliances
Success brought fresh strain. Wolfe chafed at being labeled as merely autobiographical, and he worried that his reliance on Perkins overshadowed his own authority. After years at Scribners he made the difficult decision to leave and signed with Harper and Brothers in 1937. There he worked with editor Edward Aswell, to whom he entrusted masses of manuscript, sketches, and notebooks. The change was more than a business decision; it reflected a desire to reinvent his methods and his public image. Even so, he retained personal ties to Perkins and other colleagues, and the literary world watched closely as he attempted to shape new books apart from the Scribners circle that had also included Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Witness to a Troubled Age
During the mid-1930s Wolfe traveled in Europe and saw at first hand the atmosphere in Germany as authoritarianism hardened into a regime. He wrote with alarm about what he saw, contributing an essay that warned of the danger and cruelty taking hold. This public note of witness complemented the private urgency of his fiction, which sought to capture a nation brimming with vitality but shadowed by economic crisis and political turmoil. The scope of his ambition widened as he tried to braid personal memory with the broader currents of history.

Style, Method, and Daily Practice
Wolfe wrote in long, rhapsodic sentences, piling image upon image, and he favored catalogs, invocations, and cadences that recalled oratory and hymn. His method was to draft far more than he could use, roaming across subjects and scenes, and then compress through revision and editorial collaboration. He fused the concrete details of family life, travel, and work with an almost symphonic drive toward totality. Friends and editors often remarked on his physical energy and his capacity for immersion; he could write for hours, walking the streets after midnight and returning to the page. The intensity carried risks, as deadlines loomed and manuscripts ballooned, but it gave his books their distinctive breadth and pulse.

Final Years and Last Works
By the late 1930s Wolfe was assembling new fiction out of the mountains of pages he had delivered to Harper. He had reached a point of hard-earned control, discovering fresh structures for the surging materials of memory and observation. While traveling in the American West in 1938, he became seriously ill. He was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he died in September 1938, not yet 40, of complications from tuberculosis that had attacked the brain. The loss stunned his peers. Perkins, who had guided him through his first books, mourned privately; Aswell undertook the arduous task of preparing the posthumous manuscripts for publication. From those pages came The Web and the Rock and You Cant Go Home Again, volumes that extended his portrait of the aspiring writer and the restless republic that shaped him.

Reception, Influence, and Legacy
Even in his life, Wolfe prompted strong reactions: admiration for the audacity and music of his prose, impatience with its amplitude, and fascination with the boundary between life and art. After his death, readers and critics continued to debate the editorial shaping of his texts. Yet the books endured, loved by those who found in them an overwhelming sense of presence and time. Younger writers, including figures in the postwar generation, acknowledged his example as license to write on a grand scale about ones origins and to chase the contours of a nation in flux. Asheville itself, once stung by his first novel, grew to honor him as a native son, a sign of reconciliation that mirrored the larger story of his reputation.

An American Original
Thomas Wolfe stands as a writer of amplitude and longing, determined to make literature from the fullest range of feeling and experience available to him. He moved among editors and artists such as Maxwell Perkins, Aline Bernstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Edward Aswell, learning from each encounter while insisting on his own voice. His fiction bears witness to the struggle to find form for a life felt at overwhelming scale. That struggle, captured in the apprenticeship of Look Homeward, Angel, the expanses of Of Time and the River, and the posthumous summations that Aswell shaped, remains the key to his power. He wrote as if time itself were his subject and the river of memory his chosen instrument, and in doing so he left a body of work that continues to speak to readers searching for the shape of a self within the larger story of America.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Thomas, under the main topics: Writing - Art - Book - Mortality - Success.

Other people realated to Thomas: Charles Scribner, Jr. (Publisher), George P. Baker (Writer), David Herbert Donald (Historian)

• 1991 The Good Child's River (Novel)
• 1941 The Hills Beyond (Novel)
• 1940 You Can't Go Home Again (Novel)
• 1939 The Web and the Rock (Novel)
• 1935 Of Time and the River (Novel)
• 1929 Look Homeward, Angel (Novel)