Book Review: Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life, by Ted Mitchell (1999)

The cover of the paperback edition of Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life, by Ted Mitchell, 1999. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Thomas Wolfe and his mother Julia on the steps of the house where he grew up, which is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.

There have been several biographies written about the American author Thomas Wolfe, and Ted Mitchell’s 1999 book Thomas Wolfe: A Writer’s Life, fills an important gap by giving the reader a shorter overview of Wolfe’s life and work. Coming in at 120 pages, it’s more concise than the full-length Wolfe biographies by Andrew Turnbull, Elizabeth Nowell, and David Herbert Donald.  

Mitchell gives the reader a good sense of Wolfe’s personality and psychology. The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is the house where Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. Tom’s mother operated it as a boarding house from the time Tom was 6 years old. When I visited the house last week, I was puzzled that the site director hadn't pointed out Tom’s bedroom to me. As we were about to leave the second floor I asked, “Which bedroom was Tom’s?” She said “Tom didn’t have one. He moved around from room to room depending on which rooms weren’t being rented.” It struck me immediately that this was a key fact about Thomas Wolfe.  

Wolfe stood 6 feet 6 inches tall, and he wrote “the world of six feet six...is the strangest and most lonely world there is.” (p.43) Wolfe was always searching for a home, for a sense of belonging. Mitchell quotes from a letter of Wolfe’s written towards the end of his brief life: “although you can’t go home again, the home of every one of us is in the future: there is no other way.” (p.80)  

Mitchell paints a portrait of Wolfe as sometimes difficult, sometimes pleasant, but always devoted to his work and craft. After going through the exhibit on Thomas Wolfe’s life in the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and seeing all of the photos of Wolfe throughout his life, I was struck by how serious Wolfe looks in almost every photo. You can tell this is a man who was thinking deeply about life and art.  

I don’t know Thomas Wolfe’s work very deeply, but I found it moving to see the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, the site where he was born (it’s now a YMCA parking lot) and his gravesite during the same afternoon. It’s hard to explain exactly why I was so moved. Part of it is the tragedy of a life being cut short, wondering what might have been. And part of it is the sense I get from Wolfe of devoting himself so fully to the creative life. I was moved when I walked through beautiful Riverside Cemetery, on top of rolling hills, on a gorgeous sunny afternoon, and came upon Thomas Wolfe’s grave. Part of the inscription reads, “A beloved American author.” As someone who puts words to paper, you can’t ask for a better tribute than that. There is a small urn in front of Wolfe’s grave. Instead of bouquets, it’s filled with pens. I was annoyed with myself for not having anything with me, no coin, no rock, nothing to deposit in homage. But as I stood at Wolfe’s grave, I saw a penny in the mud in front of the stone. I picked it up, brushed it off, and put it on his headstone. I felt much better. The next day, on a rainy afternoon, I returned to Wolfe’s grave with a pen, which I put in the urn. The gesture was now complete, homage had been properly paid.  

I learned many interesting facts about Thomas Wolfe from this book. One of them was that when Wolfe was preparing to attend college, he wanted to attend Princeton. Had he gone to Princeton, Wolfe likely would have encountered another young man with literary aspirations: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wolfe would have overlapped with Fitzgerald at Princeton for a year, but Wolfe ended up going to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he didn’t meet Fitzgerald until 1930, when they were both in Switzerland.  

Mitchell gives the reader an excellent overview of the illness that struck Wolfe down in his prime. What seemed at first to be a high fever and pneumonia was actually miliary tuberculosis. When doctors thought that Wolfe might be suffering from a brain tumor as well, he was sent to the finest brain surgeon in the country, Walter Dandy. Dandy soon discovered that the disease had spread to Wolfe’s brain, and during surgery, he knew it would be impossible to remove all the tubercules. Wolfe died three days later, at just 37.  

Ted Mitchell’s book Thomas Wolfe: A Writer’s Life, is an excellent overview of Wolfe’s life and art.