Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Thomas Wolfe, American.

by Priscilla Marion Taylor

Thomas Clayton Wolfe, born in 1900 and died in 1938, is an American writer who well typifies his generation both in his life and in his works. A Southern boy who came North to live and make his reputation, he grew up in Ashville, North Carolina, a small mountain town. His mother's people were of sturdy, Scotch-Irish and English stock and had lived there many years, his father was of mixed German and Welsh stock from Pennsylvania. Wolfe was the last of their eight children, and after his parents separated was brought up alone by his mother. He attended the local grammar school, and prepared for college at a small, but progressive private school in the neighborhood. Undoubtedly the training in this school which emphasized independence of mind effected Wolfe's later career. Wolfe attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for four years and received his degree at the age of nineteen. Here he was a prominent student, editing the college paper in his last year and belonging to practically everything on campus. After his graduation he went to Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts where he took two years of graduate work in English, receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1922. At Harvard he took Professor Baker's famous play course, and spend a good deal of his time doing creative work. In February, 1924, Wolfe received an appointment to the faculty of English at Washington Square College, one of the departments of New York University in New York City, and he taught there with several leaves of absences for travel and study in Europe until 1930. In that year six months after the publication of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative work and resigned his position to devote his remaining eight years to writing. After a year in Europe during which he complete the manuscript for Of Time and the River, Wolfe returned to America and settled down in Brooklyn to write. It was at this time that he determined to go on alone and broke with his editor friend, Maxwell Perkins, who had done so much work in the revision of Wolfe's novels. The fruit of these seven years in Brooklyn were the two volumes, published posthumously, The Web and the Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again. In 1938 as Wolfe was setting out for the Pacific Northwest, he had an attack of pneumonia and recovered only to die September 15, 1938 of a cerebral infection at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was buried there in the Riverside Cemetery near the grave of O. Henry. Wolfe's published works include, beside his four novels for which he is most famous, two plays, an autobiographical sketch, The Story of a Novel, book of collected short stories, From Death to Morning, and lyric passages from his novels collected in The Faces of a Nation. His output was tremendous, however, for his novels are very long, running from 900 to 1500 pages each. Wolfe was a tremendous man with tremendous appetites. He stood six feet, six inches tall and had a large ungainly frame. He ate and drank tremendously,…