Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the Asheville-born novelist of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 15, 1938. He was thirty-seven. A bout of pneumonia on a western trip had revealed miliary tuberculosis of the brain; surgery could not save the writer whose pages poured hometown memory into American modernism at a volume editors struggled to contain. Born October 3, 1900, in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe studied at the University of North Carolina and Harvard, taught briefly in New York, and then wrote as if the mountains and the boardinghouse of his youth were an inexhaustible mine. Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s became both collaborator and brake. The books made him famous and controversial at once: lyric excess to some critics, unmatched American appetite to others. Illness cut the work short before the postwar generation finished arguing with him. Baltimore’s hospital corridors replaced the Pullman cars and lecture halls of a man who had seemed built for long distances. Asheville would later claim him with museums and arguments; the death certificate claimed him first. He died in Baltimore on September 15, 1938. Riverside Cemetery in Asheville holds the grave; the unfinished manuscripts held the rest. Wolfe’s inheritance is abundance — sentences that refuse to leave a room until every object has been named. Later writers trimmed what he flooded; fewer escaped his hunger for home as myth. Notice Nearby records the Baltimore death date so September 15 keeps the North Carolinian who could not go home again and never stopped trying on the page.