born Oct. 3, 1900, Asheville, N.C., U.S.
died Sept. 15, 1938, Baltimore, Md.
U.S. writer.
Wolfe studied at the University of North Carolina and in 1923 moved to New York City, where he taught at New York University while writing plays. Look Homeward, Angel (1929), his first and best-known novel, and Of Time and the River (1935) are thinly veiled autobiographies. In The Story of a Novel (1936) he describes his close working relationship with the editor Maxwell Perkins , who helped him shape the chaotic manuscripts for his first two books into publishable form. His short stories were collected in From Death to Morning (1935). After his death at age 37 from tuberculosis, the novels The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were among the works extracted from the manuscripts he left.