It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

" 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.