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Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina. Tom and brother Ben lived with their mother in a boarding house that she ran while their sister and father lived in an old family home. There was trouble in Tom’s family from a very early age and due to the tension and differences, his parents split the family. Tom’s mother and father’s separation early in his life and gave him a great loneliness that turned him to books. Thomas Wolfe wrapped himself into the books he would read and they came alive to him and he began to drift away into another world that was not torn apart. Tom used the pains and torments from his childhood and young adulthood to passionately write his greatest novels. Even though he died at a very young age, Thomas Wolfe left the literary community an inheritance.
Tom, an avid reader at a very young age, also became a very intelligent student. Tom enrolled in the University of North Carolina at the age of fifteen. Tom’s passion for writing flourished during his college days. While an undergraduate, he was a member of the Carolina Playmakers. The Carolina Playmakers consisted of a group of students that wrote and performed their own plays. Tom discovered a desire to become a playwright during these years at the University of North Carolina.
After his graduation from the University of North Carolina in 1920, he borrowed money to enroll at Harvard. While at Harvard he studied drama intensively. By 1922, Thomas Wolfe had completed his master’s degree. Over the next couple years he would teach at New York University, attempt unsuccessfully to sell his plays and travel abroad. It was during this time of teaching and traveling that he completed his first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.”
“Look Homeward, Angel’ is an energetic and individual novel because the hero of the book, Eugene Gant, is young Tom Wolfe. Tom Wolfe’s writings deliver a very probing blend of practical, and painstaking journeys dotted with romantic personal anguish. “Look Homeward, Angel,” was published in 1929 receiving wide ranged reactions from brutal criticism to exalted praise. Thomas Wolfe’s characters are always vivid and bigger than life surrounded by sensations, sounds and sights that flow in harmony.
Thomas Wolfe carried on the character of Eugene Gant in his 1935 publication “Of Time and the River.” In 1939 and 1940 two more autobiographical books were published, “The Web and the Rock” and “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Both of these were published after his unexpected death from pneumonia in 1938. Wolfe also published a collection of short stories called, “From Death to Morning.” This collection contained perhaps his greatest works.
Sinclair Lewis spoke of Thomas Wolfe in his Nobel Prize address in 1930, saying that Wolfe’s talent, as a writer was promising. Bernard De Vito also acknowledged Thomas Wolfe’s talent but stated his work lacked control and form. Wolfe was also attacked by the citizens of his own hometown of Asheville because of his unfavorable descriptions of the town in his works. Wolfe’s passion to express in written word every emotion felt is what caused the majority of his work to take on an autobiographical nature. Thomas Wolfe injected his childhood emotions, fears, pains and torments into his writings coupled with his greatest fantasies and desires to give to the literary community some of the greatest writings ever.
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