Editing Thomas Wolfe (section)

==Death==
In 1938, after submitting over one million words of manuscript to his new editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe left New York for a tour of the Western United States.<ref name="vqr western journey">{{cite web | title =  A Western Journey | work = Virginia Quarterly Review | date = Summer 1939 | url = http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1939/summer/wolfe-western-journey/ | access-date = November 10, 2009 }}</ref> On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, "Writing and Living", and then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited.<ref name="vqr"/> Wolfe wrote to Aswell that while he had focused on his family in his previous writing, he would now take a more global perspective.<ref name="vqr aswell">{{cite web | title = Notes on 'A Western Journey' | work = Virginia Quarterly Review | date = Summer 1939 | url = http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1939/summer/aswell-notes-western-journey/ | access-date = November 10, 2009 | url-status = dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20091208150521/http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1939/summer/aswell-notes-western-journey/ | archive-date = December 8, 2009 }}</ref> In July, he became ill with pneumonia while visiting Seattle, spending three weeks in the hospital there.<ref name="wj cash mabel"/> His sister Mabel closed her boarding house in Washington, D.C. and went to Seattle to care for him.<ref name="wj cash mabel"/> Complications arose, and Wolfe was eventually diagnosed with [[miliary tuberculosis]].

On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment by [[Walter Dandy]],<ref name="wj cash mabel"/> the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, but an operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died 18 days before his 38th birthday.<ref name="vqr aswell"/>

On his deathbed and shortly before lapsing into a coma, Wolfe wrote a letter to Perkins.<ref name="nc historic perkins">{{cite web | title = Thomas Wolfe Memorial: Maxwell Perkins | publisher = NC Historic Sites | url = http://www.nchistoricsites.org/wolfe/perkins.htm | access-date = November 10, 2009 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20161223060416/http://www.nchistoricsites.org/wolfe/perkins.htm | archive-date = December 23, 2016 | url-status = dead }}</ref> He acknowledged that Perkins had helped to realize his work and had made his labors possible. In closing he wrote:

<blockquote>I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.<ref>[http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/Sections/hs/wolfe/bio.htm North Carolina Office of Archives and History - A Brief Biography of Thomas Wolfe] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070917094729/http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/Sections/hs/wolfe/bio.htm |date=September 17, 2007 }}</ref></blockquote>

Wolfe was buried in [[Riverside Cemetery (Asheville, North Carolina)|Riverside Cemetery]] in Asheville, North Carolina, beside his parents and siblings.

After Wolfe's death, ''The New York Times'' wrote: <blockquote>His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled. The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius ... There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.<ref name="vqr"/></blockquote> ''Time'' wrote: "The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected."<ref name="time 1938">{{cite magazine | title =  Books: Unpredictable Imagination | magazine = [[Time (magazine)|Time]] | date = September 26, 1938 | url = https://time.com/archive/6779735/books-unpredictable-imagination/ }}</ref>