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I'm surprised that you are the first to mention Thomas Wolfe. As I understand it, his 4 major books were compiled by an editor from scraps that Wolfe had left lying around. If I remember correctly, Look Homeward, Angel and The Web and the Rock were the same story told twice, and Of Time and the River and You Can't go Home Again were another twice-told tale (I may have those mixed up. I read all of them 60 years ago while I was a bored EM in the Army). I won't post those for the list, as I'm not sure how they were rated in their now-forgotten time.

Wolfe was incredibly influential after WWII. Writers like Styron and Kerouac and James Jones swore by him. Nowadays it’s hard to see what they found in him. Maybe it was just the experience of being young and lonely with great expectations of the future ahead and feeling poetic about life. Anyway, I found it very hard to get half-way through his first book (LHA). The man did take his time getting to the point (if there was one).