Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006170289
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: George & Rosalie Leposky
DATELINE: ASHEVILLE, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Now, Asheville is proud of its native son's literary fame.
The boarding house that was Wolfe's boyhood home has become a state historic site, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, filled with his own possessions and his family's furnishings. Around the corner, a new visitor center is under construction.
All over town, tour guides point out significant locations in Wolfe's life, and the local public library is publishing a new bibliography of its collection of Wolfe memorabilia.
This fall, Ashevillians will hold their first annual Thomas Wolfe Festival to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Wolfe's birth with tours, readings, plays and literary workshops. All festival events are free, except a banquet and a play. Because the festival, Oct. 3-7, coincides with Asheville's fall color season when hotels are full, potential visitors should make reservations now.
Wolfe was born at 92 Woodfin St. on Oct. 3, 1900, the youngest of seven children of stonecutter William Oliver Wolfe's marriage to his third wife, Julia E. Westall Wolfe. A bronze-and-granite marker noting the site of Wolfe's birth, now a YMCA parking lot, will be unveiled on Wednesday, Oct. 3.
Other Wednesday events include a birthday reception at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial with Wolfe family members and a $15 banquet at the Radisson Hotel Asheville. After dinner, the Asheville Community Theater will present "Wolfe on Wolfe," a series of dramatic readings, dramatizations and musical selections based on Look Homeward, Angel.
On Thursday morning, Oct. 4, Ted Mitchell, a guide at the memorial, will lead a Wolfe-themed walking tour of downtown Asheville.
Even today, downtown greatly resembles the community Wolfe knew in the first third of the 20th century. About 160 buildings from that era, including many art deco structures, are undergoing renovation and adaptive reuse. Mitchell's tour will begin at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and end at the Pack Library (the main branch of the local public library system) to open an exhibition of photos depicting Wolfe's early years in Asheville.
That afternoon Mitchell will lead a tour of Riverside Cemetery, where Wolfe and short-story writer William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) are buried. Both are in hilltop sites marked by arrows along the cemetery roadway.
Thursday evening the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater will present "October Has Come Again," a selection of Wolfe readings, at the Montford Park Amphitheater.
An all-day workshop on Wolfe is planned for Friday, Oct. 5, at Pack Library's Lord Auditorium. The morning program, Thomas Wolfe and His Family, is a slide and tape presentation of the Wolfe family. In the afternoon, members of the Thomas Wolfe Society will discuss Who is Wolfe?
Friday evening the Smoky Mountain Repertory Theater will present the premiere of "Mountain Voices," a play with Wolfe as one of the characters.
On Saturday afternoon, Oct. 6, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial will present a living history presentation of the boarding house experience. That evening the Asheville Community Theater will offer a musical tribute in "Thomas Wolfe: An American Celebration." Admission is $5.
Events on Sunday, Oct. 7, include a tour of Thomas Wolfe's Asheville by the Preservation Society of Asheville and "Last Words," with actor C. Earl Leininger of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater reading from the porch of the memorial.
Wolfe based many of his novels and short stories on the people, locations and experiences of his early years. He traveled a good deal for a turn-of-the-century child, including a stint during the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where his mother operated the North Carolina boarding house.
In 1906, she bought the 17-room boarding house in Asheville and called it Old Kentucky Home. It was built of wood in the Queen Anne style in 1883, with stained glass windows and a floral-patterned gray slate roof.
"Tom never had a bedroom of his own ," says Steven A. Hill, manager of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. "He had to wander through the house looking for a room that a boarder wasn't using."
In 1916, the year Wolfe left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his mother added 12 rooms and electricity to the Old Kentucky Home. "Today's visitors see the boarding house as it was used by Mrs. Wolfe in 1916," Hill says.
When the boarding house business slackened during the winter, mother took young Tom to Hot Springs, Ark., for its curative waters; to New Orleans for Mardi Gras; and to several Florida cities with investment opportunities. She invested heavily in real estate, lost her holdings in the Depression, and continued to run the boarding house until 1945.
Wolfe earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of North Carolina and a masters degree in theater arts from Harvard, and taught for several years at New York University. He made seven trips to Europe and spent a total of about five years there. "Look Homeward, Angel" was written almost entirely in London.
Wolfe's thinly veiled portrayals of real people angered many Ashevillians - including more than a few who hadn't bothered to read the book. A local legend credits novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald with bringing Angel home by donating the first Wolfe volumes to Pack Library. Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's edited both men's work and introduced them.
Fitzgerald visited Asheville often from 1935 until his death in 1940 because his wife, Zelda, was a patient at Highland Hospital, a local sanitarium. While in Asheville, Fitzgerald stayed in Suite 441-443 at the Grove Park Inn, a massive stone resort built in 1913 on Sunset Mountain.
By the time Wolfe returned home in 1937, the only Ashevillians still miffed at "Look Homeward, Angel" were those left out of the book. "He was quite pleased with his reception and spent most of that summer in and around Asheville," Hill says.
A year later, Wolfe died of tubercular meningitis and was buried in Riverside Cemetery.
About Asheville
In 1910, when Wolfe was growing up in Old Kentucky Home, Asheville had about 25,000 permanent residents, 250,000 visitors who came for mountain air and fall color, and 110 boarding houses.
Today Asheville is enjoying a resurgence of small hotels. In 1985 three historic buildings were converted into the 33-room Haywood Park Hotel. For information contact the hotel at One Battery Park Ave., Asheville, N.C. 28801, phone 1-800-845-7638.
The city also has at least 15 bed-and-breakfast establishments and country-style inns. A free pamphlet, Bed and Breakfast and Country Inns of Western North Carolina, is available from the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce.
The chamber also offers information on special events, and two other free pamphlets: Illustrated Map of Asheville, A National Historic District; and Downtown Asheville Walking Tour of Historic Buildings. Contact the chamber at P.O. Box 1010, Asheville, N.C. 28802, phone 1-800-257-1300.
Admission to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial will be free during the festival. At other times it's $1 adults, 50 children. The Memorial is open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. except 1-5 p.m. Sunday from April through October. Winter hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1-4 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday, Thanksgiving, and Dec. 24-25. The Memorial is at 48 Spruce St., P.O. Box 7143, Asheville, N.C. 28807, phone 704-253-8304.
The Grove Park Inn and Country Club opens its collection of memorabilia to the public on Friday afternoons by appointment. Contact the Grove Park Inn and Country Club, 290 Macon Ave., Asheville, N.C. 28804, phone 1-800-438-5800.
by CNB