By: Dustin Morgan

1. By: Dustin Morgan

2. Background • Born: 3-Oct-1900 • Birthplace: Asheville, NC • Died: 15-Sep-1938 • Location of death: Baltimore, MD • Cause of death: Tuberculosis • Remains: Buried, Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, NC • Gender: Male • Race or Ethnicity: White • Occupation: Novelist • Nationality: United States • Executive summary: Look Homeward, Angel • Father: William Oliver Wolfe (stonecutter) • Mother: Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe (ran a boarding house) • Sister: Mabel Wolfe Wheaton • Brother: Fred Wolfe • Brother: Benjamin Wolfe

3. Author Background • Thomas Wolf has written four autobiographical novels. During his youth, he lived in a middle class mountain resort town. Wolfe's Mother, Julia E. Wolfe, was a successful female real estate speculator. Wolfe felt her interest was a disease that interfered with her duties as a wife and mother. William Oliver Wolfe, his father, was a tombstone maker. While he provided well for his large family, he delighted in all the robust sensual aspects of life. He drank heavily and often cursed at his family much quoting from Shakespeare. Wolfe portrays both of his parents.

4. Childhood • Wolfe was the youngest of eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. During his childhood the family member closest to him was his brother, Benjamin Wolfe. In Look Homeward, Angel he writes about Ben. It is Ben that inspired Wolfe to be a writer. The description of Ben's death in Look Homeward, Angel is emotionally gripping.

5. School • After age eleven Wolfe attended a private school in Asheville where he received personal attention and encouragement. Before he was sixteen, Wolfe entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the university, he wrote for school magazines and newspapers, and became the editor of the Tar Heel the school newspaper. His ideas about a career leaned toward theater, because of his work with the Carolina Playmakers under Professor Frederick Koch.

6. Theatre Writer • When Wolfe graduated, at age twenty, he went to Harvard to study play writing under Professor George Pierce Baker, in his renowned 47 Workshop. He stayed at Harvard for three years. He completed his Master of Arts Degree in Literature in two years, but remained an extra year to gain more experience in the 47 Workshop. Wolfe later wrote of Harvard life, and the 47 Workshop in particular, in Of Time and the River. • Though Wolfe had a good eye for scene, character, and drama his writing style was not well suited to the theater. Unable to get his plays produced, Wolfe took a job as an English instructor at New York University in 1924. He taught off and on at the Washington Square campus from 1924 until 1930.

7. When his first course of teaching was finished, he took his savings and sailed for Europe. On his voyage home in August 1925 he met Aline Bernstein, and they began a love affair. Though they had much in common in their works, their lives were really opposite. She was almost twenty years older than Wolfe, married, and the mother of two grown children. She had been born and raised in New York City. Her husband was a successful New York businessman who gave her a life of wealth.

8. Look Homward Angel • In June of 1926, while on vacation in England with Mrs. Bernstein, Wolfe began to write what would become Look Homeward, Angel. With the aid of Mrs. Bernstein, he was able to continue his writing in New York. It was this artistic, emotional, and financial support Wolfe wanted to recognize when he dedicated the book to her when published by Scribners, in October of 1929.

9. Of Time and River • However, Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein had problems in their affair. In March of 1930 Wolfe was awarded and it allowed him to travel to Europe for almost a year. It gave the opportunity to end his relationship with Mrs. Bernstein. When he returned to New York in February 1931 he rented an apartment in Brooklyn. He continued his second book.

10. Influences • Wolfe found he could replace the emotional support he had with his editor, Maxwell Perkins. He also edited such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Perkins became very close to Wolfe, he became the son he never had. Though there has been much debate about Perkins influence over the construction of Of Time and the River, there can be no doubt of his great belief in Wolfe's talent and ability.

11. Death of Thomas Wolfe • In 1937, Wolfe broke with Scribners and signed a contract with Harpers. The young Edward Aswell, became his editor. Later Wolfe came down with pneumonia. September of 1938 Wolfe put in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Walter Dandy, the brain surgeon at the time, believed Wolfe had tuberculosis of the brain. On September 12 he operated, in a last effort to save Wolfe's life. He found the entire right side of Wolfe's brain was covered. Nothing could be done. On September 15, 1938, never having regained consciousness, Thomas Wolfe died. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina.

12. Summary • Though his life was short, his literary achievements were, large. His four short stories Of Time and River, Look Homeward Angel, From Death Till Morning, and The story of a Novel will be remembered. He breathed life into his vision of the world around him. The quality of his writing, his vast vocabulary are found no where else in American literature. He communicates his experiences through the shapes, sounds, colors, odors, and textures of life, and he proclaims his impressions of the world with mastery.

13. Famous Works • The Crisis in Industry, The University of North Carolina, 1919. • Look Homeward, Angel, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929. • Of Time and the River, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. • From Death to Morning, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. • The Story of a Novel, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. • You Cant go Home Again 1940 • He did write many more articles for newspapers but these are his main works of literature.

14. "...by the door, he put the heavy simpering figure of an angel. ...it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy."

15. Child • "Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighted perhaps 130 pounds.... • He was a child when he went away..." • Look Homeward, Angel

16. Childhood • "Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it." • Look Homeward, Angel

17. Father “ ...a strange wild form of six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized as classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy grin around the corners of his thin wailing mouth. ...He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully.His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health...” • Look Homeward, Angel

18. Thomas’s Mother • "...noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child's stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric delight." • Look Homeward, Angel

19. Thomas’s Brother • "He had aqueous gray eyes, and a sallow bumpy skin. His head was shapely, the forehead high and bony. His hair was crisp, maple-brown. Below his perpetual scowl, his face was small, converging to a point: his extraordinarily sensitive mouth smiled briefly, flickeringly, inwardly--like a flash of light along a blade. And he always gave a cuff instead of a caress: he was full of pride and tenderness." • Look Homeward, Angel

20. Sources • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolfe • http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/08/14/wolfe-final-journey/ • http://library.uncwil.edu/wolfe/bio.htm • http://www.wolfememorial.com/life.html • http://library.uncwil.edu/wolfe/wolfe.html • http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nndb.