A prolific and handsome dude! In his thirty-eight years Thomas Wolfe wrote four long autobiographical novels ... the first and most famous was Look Homeward, Angel; the second was The Web and the Rock. The final two, You Can't Go Home Again and Of Time and the River, were published posthumously, having been edited from one long manuscript called October Fair which Wolfe had turned over to a publisher shortly before his death. In my youth if you were thinking of yourself as a serious reader you needed to have read some Thomas Wolfe. Among the many novelists inspired by Wolfe was Jack Kerouac, whose first and most accomplished novel, The Town and the City, was, according to Kerouac himself, an attempt at writing a novel in the manner of Thomas Wolfe.
Wolfe died of tuberculosis of the brain in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
(The photo is the artwork of Michael Deas for a stamp issued on the centennial of Wolfe's birth in 2000.)
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