His most renowned contributions were his two-volume work "The Fungi" which served as a reference and textbook for fungal morphological and evolutionary studies for several years and his "Tobacco Disease and Decays" book.
The family owned a quarter-section farm in Gage County, Nebraska, near Odell, where Wolf grew up and worked while attending elementary and high school.
He completed his Ph.D. in 1911 with a dissertation focused on the development of the perfect state of Diplocarpon rosae Black Spot of Roses fungal causal agent, for which he has given the binomial name.
During this time, he became interested in tobacco and began to study different bacterial pathogens of crops including the causal agent of Granville Wilt, Ralstonia solancearum.
[3][4] During his tenure, Wolf took two sabbatical leaves from Duke University, one from 1933 to 1934 at Harvard, and the second from 1947 to 1948 in Venezuela where he worked with the Ministry of Agriculture in the country to improve tobacco cultivation techniques.
His relationship with Venezuela continued even after his sabbatical as he was invited to return a decade later to help with viral and fungal disease management and to evaluate the results of his cultivation recommendations.
After this he went back to South America, this time focused on growing Turkish and aromatic tobacco in Colombia, to which he scientifically succeeded but economically failed due to labor costs.
He took advantage of the fact that one of his Duke colleagues had cores from lake sediments in East Africa, examined them for fungus spores that were thousands of years old, and used the findings as the foundation for several papers before expanding the study to include fossil fungi from mine sites in North Carolina.
During his time in Raleigh, NC, a considerable amount of the publications he produced were related to bacterial plant pathogens, including a paper on Bacterium tabacum, a tobacco wildfire organism he described with A.C. Foster.
[16][17] Wolf taught courses ranging from mycology to bacteriology to forest pathology – teaching students from several different departments across N.C. State University.