[1] He was one of the pioneers of autobiographical fiction, and along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon.

His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on the American culture and mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive and uncomfortable perspective.

[2][5] Faulkner's endorsement, however, failed to win over mid to late 20th century critics and for a time Wolfe's place in the literary canon was questioned.

A member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, he predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today.

[2] His one-act play, The Return of Buck Gavin, was performed by the newly formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role.

He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel[7] and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry".

[11] Wolfe graduated from UNC with a bachelor of arts in June 1920, and in September, entered Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker.

In February 1924, he began teaching English as an instructor at New York University (NYU), a position he occupied periodically for almost seven years.

[11] The Theatre Guild came close to producing Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, and Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage.

The narrative, which evolved into Look Homeward, Angel, fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, and chronicled family, friends, and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street.

The original manuscript of O Lost was over 1,100 pages (333,000 words) long,[13][14] and considerably more experimental in style than the final version of Look Homeward, Angel.

It was submitted to Scribner's, where the editing was done by Maxwell Perkins, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

[21] After four more years writing in Brooklyn,[20] the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it significantly and create a single volume.

[26] In 1938, after submitting over one million words of manuscript to his new editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe left New York for a tour of the Western United States.

[28] On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, "Writing and Living", and then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited.

On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment by Walter Dandy,[21] the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, but an operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain.

In closing he wrote: I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.

[5]Time wrote: "The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected.

[34] Two Wolfe novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, were edited posthumously by Edward Aswell of Harper & Brothers.

[34] O Lost, the original "author's cut" of Look Homeward, Angel, was reconstructed by F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli and published in 2000 on the centennial of Wolfe's birth.

[15] Upon publication of Look Homeward, Angel, most reviewers responded favorably, including John Chamberlain, Carl Van Doren, and Stringfellow Barr.

Richard Aldington wrote that the novel was "the product of an immense exuberance, organic in its form, kinetic, and drenched with the love of life...I rejoice over Mr.

[39] Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic thought the book would be twice as good if half as long, but stated Wolfe was "the only contemporary writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Dostoevsky".

From this point on, positive re-assessment began to grow and current assessment of Wolfe tends to be more balanced, with a greater appreciation of his experimentation with literary forms.

[44] Today, William Faulkner and Wolfe are considered the two most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon.

[41] A cabin built by Wolfe's friend Max Whitson in 1924 near Azalea Road was designated as a historic landmark by the Asheville City Council in 1982.

It ran on Broadway for 564 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, received six Tony Award nominations, and won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

[51] The title character of Herman Wouk's 1962 bestselling novel Youngblood Hawke, and its subsequent film adaptation, was loosely based on Wolfe.

[59] Posthumous works: Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River were published in Armed Services Editions during World War II.