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FEATURED AUTHOR THOMAS WOLFE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH John L. Idol, Jr. Ernest Hemingway was pretty much on the mark when he wrote his editor and Thomas Wolfe's — Maxwell Perkins — "I think Tom was only truly good about his home town and there he was wonderful and unsurpassable. The other stuffis usually over-inflated journalese." Wolfe's hometown, Asheville, figures prominently in his work, beginningwith a play that came close to launching him as a dramatist, Welcome to Our City. Here, Asheville became Altamont, a city caught up in land speculation, boosterism, tourism and urban renewal. It is the Asheville ofthe early 1920s, but theAsheville most alive in Wolfe's work appears in Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which both pleased and angered his fellow citizens. In short stories, novellas and novels following this work, Wolfe returned time and again to Asheville and environs for material. A mere listing of the most substantial of them reveals how important Wolfe's native soil was: The Web ofEarth, which in an unsurpassable way captures his mother's narrative of events in her colorful life; the death of his father as narrated in Of Time and the River, a fictional dramatization rivaling the death of his brother Ben in Look Homeward, Angel; the days of boom and bust in Asheville's economy as presented in You Can't Go HomeAgain (1941); the graphically realistic narration ofa battle story related to him by a kinsman, "Chickamauga," and the myth-making episodes involving, among others, Zebulon Vance, a native of western North Carolina who won fame as a Tar Heel governor and senator. In the guise of Zebulon Joyner, Vance and his fictional siblings move energetically and revealingly into The HiIh Beyond (1941). The roots of Wolfe's mother's side ran deep into Blue Ridge Mountain soil. Julia Elizabeth Westall came from English-Scots stock in Yancey County, North Carolina, not very distant from the loftiest peak in Eastern America, Mount Mitchell. Presbyterian in religion, determined to overcome the blight of the War Between 13 the States and Reconstruction, and ambitious to better its economic standing, many ofher family settled in Asheville, the largest ofBlue Ridge urban areas. One of her brothers, William, was to become a prosperous lumber dealer, who, for a time shared a building with William Oliver Wolfe, a Pennsylvania stonecutter and widower whom Julia was to marry, a somewhat surprising event for her and a shock to some ofher friends because she looked upon Mr. Wolfe as an "old man," who indeed was her senior by nine years. More than years separated them: he delighted in abundance, spouted poetry and favorite lines from plays, considered many ofher mountain kin as cranks and "grill" and, at times, lifted far too many cups. Julia was parsimonious, cautious, superstitious, practical, teetotaling and determined to acquire wealth. Mismatched though they were in many ways, they were nonetheless fruitful, Julia giving birth to eight children, the last ofwhom was Thomas ClaytonWolfe, born October 3, 1900. Although dysfunctional in many respects, the family had a firm commitment to education, nowhere more evident than in the decision that resulted in their youngest son's removal from Orange Street Elementary School to study underJohn and Margaret Roberts at North State Fitting School, a preparatory institution recently opened in Asheville. Life-changing though his studies at North State Fitting School proved to be, an event much more far-reaching in its impact was Julia's decision to leave the familyhome onWoodfin Street to buy and operate a boardinghouse nearby on Spruce Street. Older siblings remained with their father, but Julia insisted on taking her baby with her. When beds were filled with boarders, Tom shared his mother's. She kept him in dresses and curled his hair long after other Asheville lads donned trousers and sported trimmed heads. Separated as he was from family and neighborhood friends, the lad naturally felt alienated, different, outcast. These feelings were eventually to be powerfully expressed in a moving personal essay entitled "God's Lonely Man," though Wolfe was to date his loneliness as beginning in his fifteenth year. Clearly, the roots are in his childhood years at the boardinghouse. Tom's studies at...

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