Writer, actor, teacher, and visual artist Thomas Langdon Wolfson died on May 14, 2024 at his South Wellfleet home with his wife, Michele, by his side. He had been fighting glioblastoma for two and a half years. He was 74.

The son of Victor Wolfson and Alice Langdon Dodge Wolfson (later Herling), Tom was born in New York City on July 19, 1949. He grew up on East 86th Street in Manhattan and attended the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side. He played football, was on the track and field team, and acted in theatrical performances. “He was very popular,” Michele said.

Vacations were in South Wellfleet in the 18th-century house his father had purchased in the 1930s for $600. His ties to Wellfleet and to the family home, where he eventually settled, remained deep throughout his life.

He graduated in 1967 and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. After three years in Wisconsin, Tom decamped to live in a commune in Vermont. By 1972 he had found his way to Los Angeles, where he worked as a truck driver for a plumbing company and then at Keenan Pipe and Supply.

He returned to school at California State University Los Angeles. While still a student, he worked as an insurance agent, setting up his own office. He graduated with a degree in psychology in 1976.

Four years earlier, he had been introduced to Michele Callahan by mutual friends at the Topanga Corral. They married in 1980 and moved to the Cape in 1983.

Tom worked on getting certified as a teacher, doing his student teaching at Dennis-Yarmouth High School and Middle School. But there were no local jobs to be had, so he accepted a position in the far north of Maine.

The isolation there was hard to take, and after submitting some 200 job applications throughout New England, Tom was hired to teach in Bristol, N.H. During his three-year stint at the high school there, Tom rekindled his love of theater. At the urging of a drama teacher friend, he acted in the annual community theater musical, which involved students, faculty, staff, and townsfolk.

Tom enrolled in Dartmouth College’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, which had been developed specifically for teachers. Although he did a series of paintings based on poems by Baudelaire, Eliot, and Cesare for one of his courses, his focus was on writing, and he started work on a novel. He received his M.A. in 1989.

Though he enjoyed life in New Hampshire, Tom’s heart remained in Wellfleet, and when his father needed care, Tom moved his family back to the old house.

Settled permanently in Wellfleet in 1989, Tom dedicated his life to the arts, working on his novel, acting in local theater, and painting. He acted in productions at the Cape Repertory Theatre in Brewster, and he particularly enjoyed working with director Mo Hanlon. Although he acted in musicals including Hello Dolly and Camelot, he preferred drama, his favorite role being Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge.

He also had a role in Miller’s All My Sons, and he performed a one-man show at Payomet and Wellfleet Preservation Hall based on one of his stories, called “The Finer Life.” Dick Morrill, a founding member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, praised “Tom Wolfson’s powerful stage presence as an actor.”

Tom’s novel, The Blackfish Inheritance, was published in 2015. Described as “a fictionalized autobiography” by Publishers Weekly, the novel was praised in the Cape Cod Times for its “totally alive and believable” characters.

Tom remained committed to community life, working as a substitute teacher, driving a school bus, and driving for the Council on Aging. His daughter, Claire, wrote in a tribute: “He humorously dubbed his journey ‘my life in transportation,’ which began with driving a horse and buggy in Central Park and evolved to sailing the seas, skiing mountain slopes, and cycling across vast landscapes.”

One cycling trip in 2001 took Michele and Tom on a tandem bike from San Diego to Pensacola, Fla. as part of a fundraiser for the Wampanoag tribe. Benefiting the Brewster Unitarian Universalist Church’s work on antiracism, the trip raised $10,000. His final ride was the Pan Mass Challenge in 2022 during his treatment for brain cancer.

“Tom was more than the sum of his endeavors,” Claire wrote. “He was a beacon of joy, a wise soul who could delve into deep conversations as quickly as he could ignite a room in laughter with his humor and charm. His legacy is not just in the roles he played or the miles he traveled but in the warmth, joy, and love he brought into our lives.”

Tom is survived by his wife of over 50 years, Michele Wolfson of South Wellfleet; daughter Claire Wolfson and husband Chris Prouty of Palm Springs, Calif.; brothers Nicholas Wolfson of New York City and Rincon, Puerto Rico and Martin Sloane Wolfson of Warwick, N.Y.; godsons Benjamin Swanson and wife Abby Roche of Harpswell, Maine and Carl Swanson of Westbrook, Maine; brother-in-law Kevin Callahan and wife Bonnie of Little Egg Harbor, N.J.; and numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Cape Rep Theatre or the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary, published in print on May 30, included several errors. The Wolfsons’ South Wellfleet house was purchased by Tom’s father, Victor, not his grandfather. Tom and Michele met at the Topanga Corral, not the Troubador, and they married in 1980, not 1973. The title of the story on which Tom based his one-man Payomet show was “The Finer Life.”