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Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Ashville, North Carolina.  His parents split when he was a child and he lived with his mother in a boarding house.  Wolfe’s loneliness was his greatest resource for writing, He rarely saw her as she worked to provide for her children.

He was an avid reader and an excellent student. He attended the University of North Carolina where he wrote plays and performed them.  He graduated in 1920 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, but had no luck publishing his work.

Eventually, Wolf found a publisher for his first novel, Look Homeward Angel.  The novel was met with both praise and criticism.  The main character, Eugene Gant, is Thomas Wolfe, and Wolfe carried this character forward in another novel, Of Time and River, published in 1935.

He was near completion on two novels, having full drafts and many revisions completed when he died of pneumonia in 1938.  The Web and The Rock, and perhaps his most well-known novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, were published in 1939 and 1940.

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