[5] In 1939 he moved to Greenwich Village, where he eventually drifted away from the Trotskyist movement and met Anais Nin and Henry Miller.
[6] Through them he found employment writing pornographic novels (11 in 11 months) for the private collection of Roy Melisander Johnson, an Oklahoma oil millionaire.
Its themes of cybernetics, artificial limbs and prostheses, computerised warfare, masochism and voluntary amputeeism would all be expanded upon in his first published novel, Limbo (1952).
The publisher claimed that Wolfe had written "the first book of science-fiction to project the present-day concept of 'cybernetics' to its logical conclusion".
[12] J. G. Ballard praised Wolfe's "lucid intelligence" and claimed Limbo helped encourage him to start writing fiction.
[13] Boucher and McComas, however, received the novel poorly, calling it "pretentious hodgepodge" and describing its theme as "a symbolically interesting idea .
"[14] P. Schuyler Miller gave Limbo a mixed review, describing it as a "colossus of a novel" while faulting its "endless talk.
His third novel, In Deep (1957), is a thriller featuring espionage, socialist hipsters and decades-old Communist vendettas played out in Cuba.
Trotskyites were highly critical of the book, particularly of Wolfe's theme that Trotsky's guilt about the Kronstadt rebellion was transformed into a masochistic death wish.
[18] A partial dramatization of The Great Prince Died on Turnley Walker's 1959 book program First Meeting[19] was instrumental in bringing Wolfe to live in California.
[20] The Magic of Their Singing (1961) is another novel about New York City's counterculture, as university graduate Hoyt Fairliss explores the world of the beats and nonconformists.
Harlan Ellison solicited two stories ("The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements", about Gordon Rengs and the generation gap) to appear in his 1972 science fiction anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions.
His novel Logan’s Gone (1974), a return to the character of Gordon Rengs, features contemporary politics with campus protests and Vietnam veterans.
In 1969 Wolfe had conducted a series of UCLA lectures on the proletarian novel,[25] and the Delano grape strike had been employed as background in several of the stories in Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up.