A Biographical Sketch of Thomas Wolfe

Photo courtesy of Pack Memorial Library, North Carolina Collection, Asheville, NC. Description: Thomas Wolfe and others standing under a gazebo, Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, June 1938. Photo probably by Edward Miller. Large print donated by Fred Wolfe. Date: 1938-06-25/26.  Geographic Location: UTAH. All photos herein courtesy of Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, NC and not to be reproduced without the permission of Pack Memorial Library.

Thomas Wolfe: A Biography
by Ted Mitchell

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900 at 92 Woodfin Street, Asheville, North Carolina, the last of W.O. and Julia Wolfe’s eight children.

His father descended from Pennsylvania German-Dutch-English farmers; his mother was a third-generation North Carolinian of Scots-Irish-English stock. Wolfe was proud to claim that "One half of me is great fields and mighty barns, and one half of me is the great hills of North Carolina."

By the time W.O. (William Oliver) Wolfe married Julia E. Westall in 1885, he had already established a successful tombstone shop on the edge of Asheville’s public square.

Julia Wolfe was an enterprising and resourceful woman who worked hard to improve her family’s economic position. She accepted boarders at the Woodfin Street house and wheeled and dealed in the real estate market of the growing resort town.

Her marriage was long plagued by her husband’s alcoholism, and when an eighteen-room Victorian boardinghouse, the Old Kentucky Home, went up for sale in 1906, she purchased the house, taking only six-year-old Tom with her, the other children remaining with their father.

The disintegration of his family’s unity and his move into the boardinghouse had a lasting psychological effect on Thomas Wolfe; he developed insecurities that would plague him to the end of his life.

He was three weeks short of his sixteenth birthday when he arrived at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on September 12, 1916. Although his first year was filled with loneliness and pain, he quickly moved into the mainstream of campus activity.

In 1917, Wolfe began to publish. He wrote stories and poems for the college magazine and in 1918, joined the newly organized Carolina Playmakers, Frederick H. Koch’s course in playwriting.

Wolfe graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1920 and set his sights on graduate study at Harvard. Urged to attend Harvard by Frederich Koch, Wolfe was convinced his dream of becoming a dramatist would be realized at Harvard.

He entered the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, in September 1920, and for three years enrolled in the same playwriting course with Professor Baker.

Wolfe’s first play written at Harvard was a folk play about North Carolina, The Mountains, and was staged by the 47 Workshop in 1921.

Although he received his Master of Arts degree in June 1922, he returned to work with Professor Baker for one more year. The 47 Workshop staged Wolfe’s play Welcome to Our City in 1923; the curtain went up at 8 p.m. and did not go down until midnight. Wolfe soon found the stage too limiting for his talent.

By late 1923, Wolfe had served his apprenticeship under Baker and while waiting for a professional production on Broadway, was hired to teach at the Washington Square branch of New York University.  He began teaching there in 1924.

Although a dedicated instructor, Wolfe accomplished little creative work while teaching. Convinced that traveling in Europe and absorbing its culture was necessary for his training as a writer, his initial plan was to take a leave of absence from New York University while traveling through Europe for two months.

On October 25, 1924, Wolfe sailed for England aboard the Lancastria and maintained his resolve to write 1500 words a day while abroad, but he did not return to his teaching post until fall of the following year. Sailing home aboard the Olympic in August 1925, he met and fell in love with Aline Bernstein, a renowned New York City stage and costume designer. Nineteen years older than Wolfe and married, Mrs. Bernstein became the great love of his life, and supplied Wolfe with not only the emotional support and belief in his talent that allowed him to write Look Homeward, Angel, but financial assistance as well.

In June 1926, Wolfe once again sailed for Europe (aboard the Berengaria) and began writing notes and phrases for the novel about his life that became Look Homeward, Angel. For the next two years he divided his time between Europe and New York working feverously to complete his massive manuscript he initially called O Lost. Completing the novel in Spring 1928, the manuscript began making the rounds of publishers while Wolfe continued his travels in Europe.

In the late fall of 1928, while in Vienna, Wolfe received a letter from Maxwell E. Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, asking him to meet with him in New York to discuss O Lost.

Wolfe returned to New York and on January 9, 1929, the manuscript was formally accepted for publication by Scribner’s. That spring Wolfe gave the novel a more evocative title—Look Homeward, Angel—(the manuscript had been trimmed down by Wolfe and Perkins to a more commercially viable length of 240,000 words).

Look Homeward, Angel was published on October 18, 1929 and created an uproar in Asheville. The novel was condemned from street corner to pulpit and banned from the public library. There are more than 200 characters in the novel, all easily identifiable citizens of Asheville. Wolfe received death threats, and it was not until 1937 that he felt safe to return to his hometown.

Look Homeward, Angel proved both a critical and commercial success, and Maxwell Perkins was eager for Wolfe to produce a new novel as soon as possible.

However, it was not until Spring 1935 that another novel by Thomas Wolfe was published. Wolfe found he was having second book trouble and along with chronic depression, fought a tendency to alcoholism which increased towards the end of his life. Wolfe’s second novel, Of Time and the River, was published on March 8, 1935, proving to be an even greater success than Look Homeward, Angel.

Wolfe broke with Perkins and Scribner’s in 1937 following accusations that he could not publish a novel without the editorial assistance of Maxwell Perkins. He negotiated with various publishers, finally settling on Harper & Brothers.

His new novel would render his growing social concerns and span 145 years of his family’s history.

The manuscript that Wolfe left with his editor at Harper’s, Edward Aswell, totaled more than 4,000 typewritten pages and contained over 1,200,000 words.

Shortly after delivering the rough draft in May 1938, Wolfe became ill with pneumonia in Seattle during a vacation which had included a two-week auto tour of the national parks with Raymond Conway and Edward Miller.

The pneumonia re-opened an old tubercular lesion in his right lung and tubercular cells suffused his bloodstream, infecting his brain. He was hospitalized in Seattle during July and August.

Taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment, Wolfe died of brain tuberculosis on September 15, 1938.

Because Wolfe’s final manuscript was ten times the size of an average novel, Edward Aswell realized there would be only a small reading public for a novel of such proportions. The manuscript was published as two novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), and a collection of stories and fragments, The Hills Beyond (1941).

Wolfe is buried in his family's plot in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery, and near the grave of another North Carolinian literary luminary, O. Henry.