Thomas Wolfe

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 and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled The Crisis in Industry. Read Less

Soon after the book's publication, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein. The publication of the novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters. Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years due to the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim fellowship. Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany. Some members of Wolfe's family were also upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.

After four more years writing in Brooklyn, 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 down significantly and create a single, bestseller-sized volume, which would be titled Of Time and the River. This novel was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel. In a twist from the publication of his previous novel, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time if they hadn't been included than if they had. The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein. Read Less

Wolfe returned to America and published a short story chronicling the incidents called "I Have a Thing to Tell You" in The New Republic. Following that publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government and he was prohibited from traveling there. Read Less

On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, Writing and Living, then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited before. Wolfe wrote to Aswell that while he had focused on his family in his previous writing, he would now take a more global perspective. In July, Wolfe became ill with pneumonia while visiting Seattle, spending three weeks in the hospital there. His sister Mabel closed her boardinghouse in Washington, DC and went to Seattle to care for him. Complications arose, and Wolfe was eventually diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis of the brain.

On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment under the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, Dr. Walter Dandy, but an attempt at a life-saving operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died 18 days before his 38th birthday. His last writing, a journal of his two-week trip through the national parks, was found in his belongings hours after his death. Read Less