Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early twentieth century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. 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 William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of beat generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. 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. Ernest Hemingway, whose succinct writing style and manly voice were in many ways the opposite of Wolfe's lumbering and ruminating style, dismissed Wolfe derisively as "the over bloated Li'l Abner of American letters." 2Early life Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922) and Julia Elizabeth Westall (1860–1945). His siblings were sister Leslie E. Wolfe (1885–1886), Effie Nelson Wolfe (1887–1950), Frank Cecil Wolfe (1888–1956), Mabel Elizabeth Wolfe (1890–1958), Grover Cleveland Wolfe (1892–1904), Benjamin Harrison Wolfe (1892–1918), and Frederick William Wolfe (1894–1980). Six of the children lived to adulthoo