September 15, 1938: Thomas Wolfe Dies

September 15, 1938: Thomas Wolfe dies, ending what could have been one of the world's great literary careers.

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina. He was the youngest of 8 children, 6 of whom lived who adulthood. His father was a stone carver, and used an angel in the window to attract customers, and it became symbolic of his youth. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where plays he wrote were staged. He got a master's degree from Harvard University, and began teaching English at New York University (NYU), while submitting plays in the hope of their being produced for Broadway.

He wrote an 1,100-page novel about his youth, renaming Asheville "Altamont," and changing the names of everyone in his family -- except for the twin brothers who had been named after Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, the latter twin having died young of typhoid in both reality and book.

Scribner's took the novel, and sent Maxwell Perkins, who had edited F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, to cut it to a sellable length. It became Look Homeward, Angel, and was published right before the stock market's Crash of 1929. The book sold really well, but the people of Asheville were not fooled by the name changes, and many of them, including most of his family, were upset by it.

He submitted another very long novel to Scribner's, and it was cut to become Of Time and the River. This time, the people of Asheville were upset because Wolfe had gone out of his way to not include portrayals of them.

He was popular in Europe, and spent time there, noticing the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, and writing the short story "I Have a Thing to Tell You," which was published in The New Republic. The Nazi government prohibited him from returning, and banned all of his books.

He returned to Asheville in 1937, for the 1st time since Look Homeward, Angel was published. Time had not healed the wounded feelings of the people he once knew. He told this to journalist Ella Winter, who had been married to journalist Lincoln Steffens, and she said to Wolfe, "Don't you know you can't go home again?" Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

Toward the end, Wolfe has his analogue for himself realize: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

He would not live to see You Can't Go Home Again published. In July 1938, he developed pneumonia, which left him susceptible to other infections, and he developed miliary tuberculosis, which spread to his brain. On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment by Walter Dandy, the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, but an operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died on September 15, 18 days before his 38th birthday.

The New York Times' obituary of him said:

His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled. The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius...

There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.

Published posthumously would be The Web and the Rock in 1939, You Can't Go Home Again in 1940, The Hills Beyond in 1941, The Hound of Darkness in 1986, and The Good Child's River in 1991. Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized him, and his novels about his own hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, such as The Town and the City and Doctor Sax, were deeply influenced by Wolfe's descriptions of Asheville. Hunter S. Thompson took the words "fear and loathing" from The Web and the Rock, and used them in the titles of two of his books.

NBC broadcast a TV-movie of Look Homeward, Angel in 1972, with Timothy Bottoms playing the Wolfe analogue, Eugene Gant. You Can't Go Home Again has never been filmed. Jude Law played Wolfe in the 2016 film Genius. 

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September 15, 1938 was a Thursday. Gaylord Perry, the pitcher who admitted to occasionally throwing a spitball, but was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame anyway, was born on this day.

These baseball games were played that day:

* While the entire American League was in action, only 1 game was played in the National League: The New York Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-2 at the Polo Grounds. Mel Ott went 0-for-1, drawing a walk, and being hit by 3 pitches. The box score doesn't say whether any of those were intentional.

* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 6-4 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (The ballpark was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) George Coffman outpitched Bump Hadley. Hank Greenberg went 0-for-3 with a walk. Lou Gehrig went 1-for-4. Joe DiMaggio went 2-for-5.

* A doubleheader was split at League Park in Cleveland. The Cleveland Indians won the opener, 3-2. The Boston Red Sox won the nightcap, 3-2. Bob Feller pitched 8 innings, but Johnny Humphries blew the game in the 9th. Jimmie Foxx went 0-for-6, but drew 2 walks, 1 with the bases loaded, and also had an RBI on a sacrifice fly.

* A doubleheader was split at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The Chicago White Sox won the 1st game, 5-4. The Philadelphia Athletics won the 2nd game, 1-0. George Caster pitched a 4-hit shutout.

* The Washington Senators beat the St. Louis Browns, 6-4 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.