Influence On Thomas Wolfe

Born October 3, 1900, Thomas Wolfe was the youngest of seven brothers and sisters. His parents, Julia Elizabeth Westal Wolfe and father William Oliver Wolfe, noticed Thomas’s talent since he was a child. Julia ran a boarding house just down the road from where she and her family lived and had lived for 21 years;she was all about her business. Eventually Julia got fed up with her husband’s drinking problem and took Thomas with her to the boarding house. Being the youngest of seven: Effie, Frank, Mabel, Grover, and Fred, Thomas was the guinea pig of his family. Thomas had his first loss in his family when he was 4, he lost his older brother Grover to typhoid. This tragedy really came down on Thomas, as he got older he turned his hurt into art.
Just like other authors of the Modernist Era, Wolfe wrote short stories and long novels. Although other authors wrote novels during this time as well, no one else had so much description than Mr. Wolfe. Thomas was best known for writing fiction. Wolfe didn't really focus on writing about the war other than a few articles like “Angel of Death”. He was more focused on writing to keep the minds of the people positive in a way. He also tried to keep them from thinking about the war that was going on around them. His writing really came from within. He looked up to Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, and many others. At first, Thomas wanted to go into playwriting, but as he started to meet all these other talented artists, he decided to write
Wolfe’s use of verbs has expanded tremendously, which helps Mr.Wolfe bring the reader into the experience, another literary trait that he holds very well. “Wolfe’s writing style is a mixture of realistic representation and romantic declaration” http://www.thomaswolfe.org/review . The way Wolfe describes his characters is very unique, his goal is to try to get the reader to feel as if he is one of the characters. He describes each character with several descriptive paragraphs. Wolfe likes to emphasize the difficult relationship between Gant and Eliza. In the novel, Wolfe compares grapevines toGant and his children, “Wolfe uses these descriptions to immerse the reader into Gant’s excesses and ceaseless isolation in order further to characterize the dichotomy of human nature.” http://www.thomaswolfe.org/review. Wolfe describes the absence of Gant’s vine to emphasize the emptiness in Gant. Wolfe described Eugene as “the fusion of two strong egotisms, Eliza’s in-brooding and Gant’s expanding outward behavior.” http://www.thomaswolfe.org/review. Eugene is lost mentally, looking for his father and trying to escape from the grip of his mother. These descriptions of Gant, Eliza, and Eugene gives “highlight to complexities of the paradoxes that lie within the characters of Wolfle’s text”.