If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

" 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.