Author. He was an American novelist of the 20th century, who became a major, yet controversial figure of American Literature. According to his critics, sweeping lyricism, extravagant rhetoric, and spirited, almost mythical celebrations of America, characterize his intensely personal writing. Wolfe maintained that all great art was autobiographical, and his four enormous novels present thinly-veiled self-portraits, in which his life and observations assume symbolic significance. "Look Homeward, Angel" in 1929 and "Of Time and the River" in 1935 are accounts of his impulsive youth channeled through the character of Eugene Gant. In the posthumously published "The Web and the Rock" in 1939 and "You Can't Go Home Again" in 1940, Wolfe is again center stage as George Webber, more seasoned and socially aware. Together they form an epic of an artist's growth in a changing society between the World Wars. Born Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, his father was a stone cutter, who made grave markers, while his mother managed a boarding house where he spent part of his childhood. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at age 19. As a graduate student at Harvard, earning a M.A. in 1924, he wrote several plays and hoped for a career in theatre, but stage producers expressed little interest in his work. Instead, he taught English intermittently at New York University from 1924 to 1930, turning his writing talents to fiction. "Look Homeward, Angel" brought him immediate fame, largely because its often-scathing depictions of people and places were recognizably drawn from life. Wolfe's hometown of Asheville was pilloried as "Altamont." The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's publishers, was his most important influence. Unable to limit the size of his prose, Wolfe poured out gargantuan texts which he later admitted had "a quality of intemperate excess, uncontrolled inclusiveness, an almost insane hunger to devour the entire body of human experience." Contrary to his critics, he was a conscious artist, who fashioned the themes and structure of his books in advance, but his lack of restraint caused him to bury the planned execution of his theme into a manic of details. Perkins patiently helped him reduce and shape the material, sometimes pulling out self-contained episodes to publish as separate stories. Fourteen of these were gathered in the book "From Death to Morning" in 1935, including the well-known "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" and "Death the Proud Brother." The author was initially grateful for the assistance, although with misgivings, and viewed Perkins as a sort of father-figure. The radical editing of two-thirds of the million-word original piece, "Of Time and the River," gave evidence to a growing speculation that Perkins, not Wolfe, was really responsible for the book's success, eventually causing professional hurdles between the two men. Wolfe unintentionally fueled the gossip by acknowledging his debt to Perkins in his long 1936 essay "The Story of a Novel." In 1937 he broke with Scribner's and formed a new working relationship with editor Edward C. Aswell at Harper's magazine. Living as large as he wrote, he was an impressive statue of a man at 6'6", who traveled extensively and had insatiable desires for women, food, alcohol, and new experiences that he duly transformed into literature. His one serious romance was with stage designer Aline Bernstein, 18 years his senior and married; she is fictionalized as "Esther Jack" in the later novels. His life style eventually took its toll on his health. In July of 1938 Wolfe was touring when he was diagnosed with pneumonia in Seattle. The illness and his run-down state activated a dormant tuberculosis, which rapidly spread to his brain. Shortly before his 38th birthday, he died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Wolfe left behind an 8-foot pile of manuscript, from which Aswell extracted "The Web and the Rock," "You Can't Go Home Again," and portions of another story collection, "The Hills Beyond" in 1941. Despite being under the general supervision of Perkins, Wolfe's literary executor, Aswell took great liberties with this material, not merely editing but altering the style and writing linking passages himself without attribution. The factual authorship and editorship debate over Wolfe's novels continues to this day. As for his reputation, it has waxed and waned. William Faulkner once called him the best American author of their generation, but later changed his mind. Wolfe's habitual wordiness and shameless romanticism have not set well with readers in the 21st century. Even his finest biographer, David Herbert Donald, admitted that "Thomas Wolfe wrote more bad prose than any other major writer I can think of," yet the enthusiasm of his style, development of characters, and choice of words gave him a dedicated following. For some critics, Wolfe is the closest the United States has come to producing another Walt Whitman.