10 Literary Icons from North Carolina — theculturetrip.com

It would be impossible to write a list of literary figures from North Carolina without placing Thomas Wolfe at the top. According to both his contemporaries and later literary critics, he belongs in the same echelon as William Faulkner (who greatly respected him), Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. A true trailblazer of American literature, Wolfe’s substantial body of work shows his complete mastery of autobiographical fiction well before it became an accepted genre. His writing is often very poetic, weaving gorgeous descriptions of the mountains surrounding his hometown of Asheville with simple and profound statements on the human condition. Wolfe unfortunately died of tuberculosis at age 38, so two of his four novels were published posthumously. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, a fictionalized account of his youth, is extremely evocative for anyone familiar with Western North Carolina.

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