George Stoney, Writer: The Early Years

In September 1916, just before his sixteenth birthday, Thomas Wolfe of Ashe-ville became a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. George Stoney, in Winston-Salem, was three months old. Wolfe was to become North Carolina's first, maybe only, great writer. In his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel, he described the college and village as "a charming, an unforgettable place." ¹ George Stoney was thirteen when his English teacher read in class from Look Homeward, Angel. He says, "I knew I was going to be a novelist ever since I picked up the first writings of Thomas Wolfe." ² George considered it prophetic that he had a newspaper delivery route in a black section of town, just as Wolfe had, and that their routes included several prostitutes. Inevitably, George would go to Chapel Hill.

George had forty-seven cash dollars with which to pursue his education. If that wasn't enough, he had an alternative plan. On his newspaper route, there was a cotton mill foreman to whom, for several months, George had been deliveringthe paper free. In exchange, the man was to help him get a job in the mill. But at summer's end, another foreman's son got the job. Chagrined and ignoring reality (and possibly missing a chance decades later to offer testimony for somebody else's version of The Uprising of '34), George took himself and his forty-seven dollars to Chapel Hill.

In January 1937, almost seventeen years after his graduation, Thomas Wolfe returned to Chapel Hill. This visit was commemorated in the October 1938 issue of the college's literary journal, The Carolina Magazine. There were a dozen articles about Wolfe by his editors, Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, by contemporaries at Chapel Hill and Harvard, by faculty members, and by several students. The longest article, and in retrospect probably the most memorable, was George Stoney's reminiscence:

We wrote of "the thousand faces, the ten thousand mouths," in a foolish effort to approximate his style. We tried to taste, smell, see with his catholicity and acuteness.... Then Eugene came back to Pulpit Hill. Tremendous, flabby, stuttering, homesick, still a boy at thirty-six, his warm brown eyes pleaded forgiveness; his stumbling heavy lips blubbered sentimentalities about how good it was to be back... ³

In the spring of 1938, George, who had recently arrived in New York, helped organize and label Wolfe's literary materials. George tells of the friendship thatdeveloped between them during that last summer. He questioned Wolfe about a remark he had made in Chapel Hill indicating that he planned eventually to return to North Carolina. "'Did you really mean that, about going back to live in Yancey County?' I asked Wolfe as we cracked pecans together in his barn-likerooms in the Hotel Chelsea in New York. He smiled a little bitterly. 'I did then. But going back taught me this one thing. A man can't go back home again.'" ⁴

The Carolina Magazine article represents a sea-change in George's aspirations fora writing career. He now no longer dreamed (if he ever really did) of becoming North Carolina's second great novelist. He realized he wouldn't match Wolfe's "lost child-face below the lumpy ragged cap, drugged in the magic of unheard music, listening for the far-forested horn-note, the speechless almost captured pass-word." ⁵ George was to make do with his own talent used in his own way.

After a harried four years of working his way through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a couple of flunked classes, and his well publicized inability to spell correctly, George finally graduated, not with his class in 1937, but in 1938. While an undergraduate, George had begun selling feature stories to the leading state paper, the RaleighNews and Observer. Some of these stories grew out of his reading in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North Carolina newspapers, which he catalogued while earning...