Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938) was an American novelist of prodigious talent and equally formidable failings. His highly autobiographical novels are notable for fervent energy, uninhibited emotion, and grandly rhetorical language.

Thomas Wolfe achieved critical acclaim for his unabashed romanticism and visionary faith in the inherent greatness of America and the heroism of its people. He possessed an extraordinary ability for portraiture and a gift for visual detail and sensory impressions, but his brilliance is often diminished in a diffuse sea of inflated irrelevancies and ranting incantations and exhortations. Modern critics have grown less infatuated with his prose and become more aware of the lack of thematic focus, structural cohesion, and controlling artistic intelligence in even his most disciplined work.

The most striking irony in Wolfe's work is that despite his spontaneous emotionalism there is an absence of compassion for any character other than his self-identifying protagonist, and despite...