Thomas Wolfe

Among the fraternity of word-drunk Hegelians we must not forget Thomas Wolfe: "At the University of North Carolina he studied under Horace Williams, a philosophy professor whom he represented as Vergil Weldon and whom he called 'Hegel in the Cotton Belt.' Williams, who was a mystic, taught him a rather loose form of the Hegelian dialectic, in which a concept, or thesis, inevitably generates its opposite, or antithesis, and the interaction of the two produces a new concept, or synthesis" [C. Hugh Holman, The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe, Baton Rouge: LSU Press (1975), 6].