I've been reading a collection of short stories by Thomas Wolfe. This is the Wolfe born in Ashville, North Carolina in 1900 and published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929. He died a young man in 1938 leaving a trail of manuscripts and stories that have become literary masterpieces.
He is not to be confused with the current writer Tom Wolfe. This Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1931. This Wolfe began his career as a journalist writing for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune. He called his mixture of literary techniques and journalism a "new journalism" that experimented with various ways to tell a fact-based story. He may be best known for his novel Bonfire of the Vanities.
Thomas Wolfe attended Harvard, while Tom attended Yale. Thomas taught for time at New York University and later spent time traveling through Europe. Tom, however, spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, mostly as a general assignment reporter.
I'm now reading The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe (Francis E. Skipp, Ed., 1987). The compilation contains all of his published short story material. The stories are arranged by date, in the order in which they were published.
Having just finished a book on the friendship between U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman, I suppose the idea of reading two authors with the same name was intriguing to me. They certainly weren't friends, nor even knew each other. Tom Wolfe was only eight years old when the elder Thomas Wolfe died at the age of 38. But a pairing is a pairing, even if only by name. I also just purchased a book published in 2003 on the friendship between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt.
For whatever reason, I'm interested in juxtaposing two historical figures, or in the case of the Wolfes two authors, and discovering what I can about their relationships. I'm not sure I'll learn anything by placing Thomas and Tom side-by-side as I read their works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that something will emerge through their writings that will be simpatico.
