Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist born in Asheville, North Carolina, on 3 October 1900. He studied at the University of North Carolina and then at Harvard, where he trained as a playwright before turning to fiction. He lived for years in New York and travelled often in Europe. His writing drew closely on his own life, his family and his home town, and it was known for its long, rhapsodic sentences and its hunger to capture the whole of American experience. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, made him famous, and it caused some local controversy because townspeople recognised themselves in it. He worked with the editor Maxwell Perkins, who helped shape his enormous manuscripts into publishable books. Wolfe died on 15 September 1938, shortly before his thirty-eighth birthday. Two novels appeared after his death. Though critics still debate his excess and his style, he remains an influential voice of American Romantic fiction, and many young readers have found in him a powerful portrait of longing and ambition.