The Thomas Wolfe Memorial
(The Old Kentucky Home)
52 North Market Street, Asheville
828-254-8304
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives -- all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention. -- from "To the Reader," in Look Homeward Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
Six-year-old Thomas Wolfe wanted to remain in the family home on Woodfin Street instead of moving into the yellow boardinghouse his mother opened just two blocks away. She, however, wanted her youngest child with her, so young Tom moved and remained in The Old Kentucky Home, as it was called, until leaving for college at sixteen. The houses, his family, Asheville, and its residents are fictionalized by Wolfe in his novels and shorter works. When his book, Look Homeward Angel, was scheduled for publication, Wolfe rushed home to warn his parents about possible consequences. His concern was warranted. For many years, Asheville's citizens wouldn't accept Wolfe's work, but by the time he returned for an extended visit in 1937, just a year before his death, he was finally welcomed home.
Obsessed with real estate, Julia Wolfe opened the boardinghouse in 1906 as a way to earn extra money for investing. She kept it running until shortly before her death in 1945. It was a busy house, it's many bedrooms often filled, with overflow guests shown to cots in the hallways. With no bedroom of his own, Thomas Wolfe would often have to search for a place to sleep. During the day, Julia, with some help, prepared meals, cleaned, worked in the garden, and dealt with other boardinghouse duties.
Today, visitors can learn about Thomas Wolfe in the Visitor Center and on a guided tour of The Old Kentucky Home. Begin in the Visitor Center with a short film about Thomas Wolfe's life and the displays in the exhibit area. Displays describe Asheville in the early 1900s, when it "was a bustling resort town...," and inform visitors about his parents, W. O. and Julia Wolfe, his eight siblings, the Woodfin Street house, and the Old Kentucky Home. Thomas Wolfe's life is portrayed -- his childhood, university years, teaching in New York, travels, falling in love, the writing of his novels and other work, and his untimely death at age 38. It is on the tour of the house, recently reopened after suffering extensive damages in a 1998 arson fire, though, that you truly step into the lives of Thomas Wolfe and his family.
The tour moves to the front steps of the picturesque house and onto the broad front porch with its inviting rocking chairs. Moving through the numerous rooms, twelve of them added by Julia, you can imagine how busy it must have been. Meals were served in the dining room, one of the first rooms you enter. The roomy kitchen is nearby, retaining some of the original artifacts, including a massive cutting table and icebox. Julia and Tom, as a small child, slept in the tiny bedroom connected to the kitchen.
The tour winds through many bedrooms, mostly set aside for boarders, each interesting in its own way, whether it's the period furniture or its placement in the home, but three are of particular interest. Downstairs, in a corner bedroom at the back of the house, Wolfe's ailing father, even though he disliked the boardinghouse, spent the last four years of his life. His death is remembered in Wolfe's writing, including the chapter, "The Death of Gant" in Of Time and the River:
And at the same moment, Gant was aware that some one had entered the house, was coming towards him through the hall, would soon be with him. Turning his head towards the door he was conscious of something approaching with the speed of light, the instance of thought, and at that moment he was filled with a sense of inexpressible joy, a feeling of triumph and security he had never known. Something immensely bright and beautiful was converging in a flare of light, and at that instant, the whole room blurred around him, his sight was fixed upon that focal image in the door, and suddenly the child was standing there and looking towards him.
Upstairs is the large bedroom Wolfe stayed in when he returned for his 1937 visit. It was here that he wrote the article, "Return," and "A Party at Jack's." Another well-known bedroom for Wolfe readers is also upstairs. In one of the front bedrooms, with windows looking out on porch and yard, Thomas's brother, Ben, died at age 27. Ben's death is recalled at the end of Look Homeward Angel.
Other rooms, too, connect Wolfe's fiction with real people and places. The two sun porches, one upstairs and one downstairs, for both gathering and summer sleeping; the parlors for entertainment; and the beloved playhouse outside, moved from the Woodfin address when the house was demolished in 1955. After Julia Wolfe's death in 1945, one of the brothers lived in the house until 1949 when it became a nursing home. Eventually, local citizens purchased the home. It opened as a historic site in 1974, with the Visitor Center opening in 1996. Thomas Wolfe seems to have predicted The Old Kentucky Home's fate in Of Time and the River: the "old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum."
When you return to the Visitor Center at the end of the tour, you may want to purchase books, postcards, and other items in the small gift shop. One worthwhile investment is the inexpensive booklet, A Literary Journey : a Guide to the Principal Sites in Asheville Closely Identified with the Life and Writings of Thomas Wolfe. It will guide you to twenty-one sites, including Riverside Cemetery where Thomas Wolfe "lies today a few feet from his maternal grandfather, the patriarch of his mother's people, his wife Martha Anne, and seven of their eleven children. His father and mother and six brothers and sisters lie close beside him in the Wolfe family plot...." A visit to The Thomas Wolfe Memorial helps bring Wolfe's writing to life. Likewise, reading his work helps visitors imagine the years Thomas Wolfe lived and looked back on The Old Kentucky Home.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim of the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained slowly up the mountain road Oliver's spirit lifted a little. It was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick black mist washed slowly around the rampart of a mountain. -- from Look Homeward Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
A Few Books
By Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward Angel
Of Time and the River : a Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth
You Can't Go Home Again
The Party at Jack's
The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe
The Lost Boy : a Novella
To Loot Myself Clean : the Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence
Look Homeward : a Life of Thomas Wolfe, by David Herbert Donald
Websites
The Thomas Wolfe Memorial
http://www.wolfememorial.com/
The Thomas Wolfe Website
http://library.uncwil.edu/wolfe/wolfe.html
The Thomas Wolfe Society
http://thomaswolfe.org/
I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen or properly imagined the place in which he was born and grew up. Asheville, North Carolina, is encircled by mountains. The trains wind in and out through labyrinths of passes. A boy of Wolfe's imagination imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all wonderful -- different from what it was where there was not for him enough of anything. Whatever happened, Wolfe would have been what he was. -- Maxwell E. Perkins
"Look Homeward Angel was my spawning ground, my birthplace, and my cradle...." -- Pat Conroy
