What hit the country in October, 1929? The stock market crash, yes. But what else? A literary whirhrind out of Asheville. North Carolina. by way of Harvard and Brooklyn. His name teas Thomas Wolfe, and his first book, LOOK HOMEWARD, angel, struck the American scene like few novels before or since. From Andrew Turnbull’s excellent biography THOM AS wolfe, to be published in February by Scribner’s, we offer this account of the writer’s leap to a fame that he enjoyed for but a few years — until his death in 1938.