Thomas Wolfe (Author) Thomas Wolfe was born in North Carolina in 1900. His mother ran a boarding house and his father a gravestone business; Wolfe was the youngest of their eight children. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published in 1929, followed by Of Time and the River in 1935, both heavily revised by his influential editor, Max Perkins. Wolfe died in 1938 from tuberculosis, aged thirty-seven. Elizabeth Kostova (Introducer) Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the novels The Historian (2005) and The Swan Thieves (2010).
Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life ... It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience -- Elizabeth Kostova, author of 'The Historian' Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished -- Charles Frazier, author of 'Cold Mountain'