American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) led a short but turbulent life. His writing was almost purely autobiographical, poignantly capturing his experiences and pursuits. Wolfe had a gift for illuminating his life so that the reader could almost visualize his painful youth and tumultuous manhood. Now, for the first time, in Looking Homeward, Morton Teicher lets us see all of the real-life people and places behind the fiction of Thomas Wolfe in a collection of 245 snapshots that chronicle this great writer’s life in a way that mere words cannot.

Wolfe’s family and friends took a remarkable number of photographs, and Teicher has spent decades collecting these images. With photos ranging from W.O. Wolfe, Thomas’s strong-willed father, to Aline Bernstein, the older, married womand Wolfe desperately loved, from Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, to the hospital where he died, Teicher has compiled a comprehensive photographic history of Thomas Wolfe. Childhood photographs and snapshots of siblings, friends, teachers, and editors are shown, as well as Wolfe’s many vacation photos. Looking Homeward is complete with images of the original dust jackets for Wolfe’s books and a section on artistic renderings of Wolfe.

With captions and an introduction that indicate the parallels between the life and the fiction, as well as a chronology, this book will be pure pleasure for any Wolfe fan and an important resource for students of literature. Teicher has provided an engrossing sequence of looks at one of America’s great novelists.