The Child by Tiger Study Guide

Thomas Wolfe was the youngest of eight children born in Asheville, North Carolina. His father was a stone-carver and made gravestones, while his mother bought and sold houses, later becoming successful in the real estate business. Wolfe lived in what is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial House until he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While in college, he aspired to be a playwright and wrote many plays which he and his friends staged themselves. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he went on to Harvard to continue his playwrighting studies. His plays were so lengthy that they were never published or performed, so Wolfe decided to pursue fiction instead. Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was edited by Maxwell Perkins, a prestigious editor at the time, who significantly shortened the manuscript. The novel was a combination of fiction and autobiography and included details of his family and the Asheville community at the time of his childhood. Wolfe went on to have a close and complicated relationship with Maxwell Perkins, at times blaming him for over-editing his work and other times crediting him for his literary success. Wolfe continued to write while teaching English at New York University. He died before he was 38 from miliary tuberculosis that had spread through his brain. He is regarded as one of the greatest American writers for his bold style and for pioneering autobiographical fiction.

“The Child by Tiger” reflects the social norms of the 1930s and the racism that lingered well after the end of the American Civil War. Growing up in North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe witnessed racial segregation and the devastating effect this had on individuals and communities. Similarly, during his travels to Germany, Thomas Wolfe witnessed discrimination against Jews and noted his observations in his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” This story was later banned from publication in Germany. Later on, Wolfe was an inspiration to the Beat Generation, whose authors, like Jack Kerouac, investigated and influenced American culture following the World Wars.

Thomas Wolfe ranks with contemporaries such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of America’s great writers. Like Wolfe, they depicted American culture during the 1920s and 30s in their stories and novels. Published just a year before “The Child by Tiger,” Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  also grapples with the theme of racism in the South and uses a similar nonchronological writing style. Later Black authors, such as Richard Wright in the novel Native Son (1940) and James Baldwin in the short story “Going to Meet the Man” (1960s), explore the ongoing impact of racism, particularly mob and police violence, in American communities. Unique among his contemporaries, Wolfe combined autobiography with fiction, particularly in his novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. Many of his other works, like “The Child by Tiger,” reflect on childhood and the influences that shape one’s growing up.