Once one of the most popular fiction writers in all of American literature, Thomas Wolfe now stands in a tenuous position in the American literary canon. This book combats the academic and critical inertia that currently surrounds Wolfe by exploring his complex relationship to modernism. The experimental nature of Wolfe’s fiction, his troubling associations with other writers and artists, his complicated publishing practices, and the development of his late political conscience are analyzed to reestablish his importance to this historically avant-garde literary movement and to twentieth-century American literature.