Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe

David Herbert Donald's biography follows Thomas Wolfe from his birth in Asheville, North Carolina in 1900, the youngest of eight children, through the childhood shock of his older brother Grover's death from typhoid fever when the family was in St. Louis, and into the years at his mother's boardinghouse, Old Kentucky Home, which Wolfe later fictionalized as Dixieland and which gave him a lifelong, restless feeling of never quite having a stable home of his own. The book follows Wolfe to the University of North Carolina at fifteen, then to Harvard, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker and began the long apprenticeship that would eventually produce Look Homeward, Angel.

Donald traces the crucial partnership with editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, who cut Wolfe's massive, autobiographical manuscript down to a publishable novel and became, in the book's telling, something close to the father figure Wolfe had never fully had. The book follows the controversy Look Homeward, Angel caused back home in Asheville, where readers recognized more than two hundred thinly disguised local figures, and follows Wolfe's growing resentment at being credited more for Perkins's editing than his own writing, a resentment that eventually drove him to leave Scribner's for a new publisher shortly before his sudden death from tuberculosis affecting the brain in 1938, just short of his thirty eighth birthday.

Donald writes with the same close attention to psychological contradiction that had already won him a Pulitzer for his biography of Charles Sumner, and reading the book means following a writer whose genuine talent came bound up with an equally genuine inability to stop writing, edit himself, or feel settled anywhere. It suits a reader who wants the full, messy relationship between Wolfe's autobiographical fiction and the actual life it was drawn from.