"In this ecocritical study of Thomas Wolfe's body of fiction, Robert Taylor Ensign explores how the celebrated writer's storytelling is founded on his dramatization - and apprehension - of the natural world's integral presence in human lives. According to Ensign, Wolfe, as ecoconscious as any American nature writer, conveyed a more emotionally vital natural world than did his contemporaries of the 1920s and 1930s. Ensign traces the engagement of Wolfe's characters with the nonhuman world to roots in a romantic tradition of American literature, as exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne."--BOOK JACKET.