There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

" Both in his 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech and original press conference announcement Sinclair Lewis the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature said of Wolfe "He may have a chance to be the greatest American writer. Afterward
Wolfe saw less than half of his work publiThomas Wolfed in his lifetime due to the amount of the material he left at his death. On the way he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture Writing and Living then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West the only part of the country he had never visited before.

He is known for mixing highly original poetic rhapsodic and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. He remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature as he was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction. He became very famous during his own lifetime.