Wolfe, Thomas Clayton (1900-1938)

US novelist. He is noted for the unrestrained rhetoric and emotion of his prose style. He wrote four long and hauntingly powerful autobiographical novels, mostly of the South: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can't Go Home Again (1940). The last two were published posthumously.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe studied playwriting at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. He settled in New York City, with hopes of becoming a dramatist. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was a realistic, brutal view of the South and Southern family life, the result of six years of work with Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins. He also wrote The Story of a Novel 1936 and the short-story collections From Death to Morning (1935) and The Hills Beyond (1941).