In this respect he was much like Whitman before him, who had sung his own egocentric song as he shouted his "barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born 3 October 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, a resort community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall, was a native of the region; his father, William Oliver Wolfe, a tombstone cutter from Pennsylvania, had settled there a few years before he married Julia. Tom was the youngest of the eight children born to the Wolfes. Six survived, and they and their parents would be fictionalized by Wolfe in his short life as a would-be dramatist, and later as a novelist.
In essence, Wolfe's books can be considered a fictional chronicle of his life, with protagonists Eugene Gant and later George Webber acting as surrogates for Thomas Wolfe . In 1904 he accompanied his mother and some of the other children to the Saint Louis World's Fair. His brother Grover, Ben's twin, died there, and this event was to haunt Wolfe throughout his life. Later he would fictionalize Grover's death in a powerfully poignant short story, "The Lost Boy."
In 1905 Tom enrolled in the Orange Street Public School in Asheville.
This is a free page. This page contains 192 words. This
biography contains 9,323 words (approx. 31 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Thomas (Clayton) Wolfe Access Pass.
