Thomas (Clayton) Wolfe, (1900-1938)


Thomas Wolfe is the author of quite a few important books in spite of an intimely death: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and River (1935), The Story of a Novel (1936) and, posthumously, The Web and the Rock (1939) and its sequel, You Can't Go Home Again, 1940. A volume of short stories, The Lost Boy, was published in 1965.
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, educated at the University of North Carolina and Harvard, Wolfe taught English at New York University from 1924 to 1930, but Powys did not meet him then. Powys noticed him, though, later:
 
Oh yes! & there's another top-notch American Book called "Of Time & the River" & if you haven't read it turn to the part about Paris & the French! It's by Thomas Wolfe, but I expect you've seen it. But you ought to allude to it {in lectures} now & again — for it's good. (John Cowper Powys, Letters to Louis Wilkinson, Sept. 30, 1937.)