The Thomas Wolfe Student Essay Prize in Honor of Richard S. Kennedy

An essay contest open to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in colleges and universities worldwide

Purpose

To foster and recognize scholarship about Thomas Wolfe by undergraduate and graduate students.

Eligibility

Students must be currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning or have graduated in the past year. Essays must be the original work of the students submitting.

Rules and Procedures

All essays must be related to Thomas Wolfe or his works. All essays must be between 8 and 15 double-spaced, typed pages in English. Documentation should follow the current MLA style. Judges will be members of the Thomas Wolfe Society appointed by its president. Essays will be judged on originality, style, clarity, documentation, and contribution to knowledge or understanding of Thomas Wolfe. Judges reserve the right not to award a prize. The original of each submission will be retained in the archives of the Society. The author may submit the winning essay for publication without restriction.

Sponsor

The Thomas Wolfe Society

Prize

Monetary prize; invitation to deliver the winning essay at the annual meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Society, with waiver of meeting registration fees; publication of the winning essay in the Thomas Wolfe Review; one-year membership in the Thomas Wolfe Society.

Deadline for Submission

January 15

Announcement of Winner

March 15

Send submissions to

Dr. James W. Clark, Jr.
Thomas Wolfe Student Prize
809 Gardner Street
Raleigh, NC 27607

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Recipients of the Thomas Wolfe Society’s Richard S. Kennedy Student Essay Prize
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1988 Daphne O’Brien, for “The Banquet of Life: Hunger and Plenty in Look Homeward, Angel.”
1989 Terry Roberts, for “Narrative Distance in Look Homeward, Angel.”
1990 Elizabeth M. Lamont, for “The Exile’s Story: Similarities of Theme in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and James Agee’s A Death in the Family.”
1991 Patricia Gantt, for “Weaving Discourse in Thomas Wolfe’s ‘The Child by Tiger.’ ”
1992 Stephen Douglas Fraser, for “The Filters of Fiction: Wolfe, Bernstein, and the Writing of The Good Child’s River.”
1993 Matthew Webb Levering, for “Around the Park with Aline Bernstein and Thomas Wolfe.”
1994 Heather O’Neill, for “‘Of Wandering Forever and the Earth Again’: Mythology in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River.”
1995 Stephen K. Simmerman, for “H. L. Mencken and Thomas Wolfe: Divergent Styles and Shared Ideologies.”
1996 Shawn P. Holliday, for “ ‘The Pity, Terror, Strangeness, and Magnificence of It All’: Landscape and Discourse in Thomas Wolfe’s A Western Journal.”
1997 Nicholas Graham, for “Looking at Wolfe through Many-Colored Glasses: Two Versions of The Party at Jack’s.”
1998 Robert T. Ensign, for “The Romantic Eco-Vision of Thomas Wolfe.”
1999 Thomas Austin Graham, for “Wolfe, Wordsworth, and the Buried Life.”
2000 Swarnalatha Rangarajan, for “Through Imagination’s Third Eye: The Creative Seer in Thomas Wolfe’s Passage to England.”
2001 Erin Sullivan, for “Recovering the Past: Models of Time in Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy.”
2002 Lisa Kerr, for “Lost Gods: Pan, Milton, and the Pastoral Tradition in Thomas Wolfe’s O Lost.”
2003 Carlton N. Morse, for “Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy: A Bildungsroman for the Modern Reader.”
2004 Armistead Lemon, for “‘His College Education Has Ruined Him’: Education’s Ambivalent Role in the South of Wolfe’s O Lost.”
2005 Bond Dillard Thompson, for “Home as Metaphor in Thomas Wolfe’s O Lost.”
2006 Wiley Cash, for “‘The Dark Was Hived with Flesh and Mystery’: Thomas Wolfe, the American Adam, and the Polemical Persona of Race.”
2007 Allison Kerns, for “‘It Was Like a Dream of Hell’: Gantian Dreams Deferred.”
2008 Chris Prewitt, for “Paper Doll Matinee: Thomas Wolfe’s Theatre.”
2010 Patrick Chambers, for “The Fruit of Forty Thousand Years.”