Literary Landscapes : Visiting Homelands That Inspired Three Great American Writers : Thomas Wolfe’s North Carolina

We came to Asheville because my friends thought I was being so understanding about their obsession with mountain crafts, I deserved a bookish interlude. If in the process they unknowingly volunteered for a modest on-site seminar in early 20th-Century American literature, it was their own fault.

The mini-course did not stop at the city line. The highlands of western North Carolina--the “Land of the Sky” as local author Christian Reid named it in 1876--are alive not only with the arts and crafts of weavers, woodworkers and ceramists, but the spirits of the writers who have called it home.

Literary giant Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville in 1900, and the area nurtured the after-Gatsby short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and was home to Carl Sandburg in his post-Midwest phase. Even George Vanderbilt--who erected his 250-room neo-French Renaissance chateau, Biltmore, here in 1895--was known among the super-rich as “the literary brother.”

Asheville (population 58,600) undoubtedly owes its early attraction to its twin rivers, its surrounding mountains and the 200 natural springs bubbling within the city limits. A resort city, it was known for its healthful elevation rather than its literary potential, though the two are not unrelated. The planters of Charleston came in summer to escape low country fevers, and in the 1920s and ‘30s, F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of many Northerners sent here for early treatment of tuberculosis.

He returned again and again, most often to Asheville’s Grove Park Inn, because his wife, Zelda, was in a nearby sanatorium.

Wolfe grew up in Asheville and his landmark autobiographical novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” is set there.

In the book that was to make him famous, Wolfe called Asheville “Altamont” and his mother’s boardinghouse “Dixieland.” The author was represented by the book’s protagonist, Eugene Gant. Indeed, “Look Homeward, Angel” was full of identifiable locals. Around western North Carolina they called it “Look Inward, Asheville.”

Shocked and dismayed, the townspeople boycotted any bookstore unfeeling enough to bring in a copy. It was decried as “malicious gossip,” and carried about in plain brown paper wrappers.

Reportedly it took the legendary charm of Scott Fitzgerald to get the book on the shelves of the author’s hometown library. It is said he presented the city’s head librarian with a winning smile and a copy of Wolfe’s book, neither of which she could resist.

Now Wolfe is the hands-down favorite son. “Mrs. Gant’s Boarding House,” a white-shingled Victorian at 48 Spruce St. and originally called My Old Kentucky Home, is preserved as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site. An interpretive center and museum is planned next door to handle the overflow of memorabilia. Thomas Wolfe Plaza marks the center of town, and the Thomas Wolfe Theater is the community playhouse.

Docents guiding visitors through the house relate the events of Wolfe’s life, many of which found their counterparts in his writing: “This is the room where Ben (Wolfe’s brother) died and Julia (his mother) was not welcome.”

Wolfe was born Oct. 3, 1900, two blocks away from My Old Kentucky Home in a house no longer existing (the children’s playhouse was moved to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial grounds), but he spent his formative years in the boardinghouse at 48 Spruce St.

He had seven older brothers and sisters and, about the time Tom was 7 or 8 years old, a division occurred in the Wolfe household. Wolfe’s father, who was a tombstone cutter from Pennsylvania, began living at his establishment behind his stonecutting shop, while Wolfe’s mother and the children resided a few blocks away at her boardinghouse.

At the latter, Tom had neither room nor bed of his own, but visitors are shown the “Golden Treasury of Prose and Poetry,” complete with what one assumes are his dirty fingerprints. And there is the sleeping porch from which he could reach the window of a young boarder with whom he had a tempestuous romance one summer when he was home from the University of North Carolina. Wolfe resented both his parents, but his boardinghouse years provided rich material for “Look Homeward, Angel.”

Many of Wolfe’s possessions were gathered back here from other places after the author died in Baltimore at age 37 from tuberculosis. Wolfe is buried beside his parents in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery.

And, yes, there was and is a stone angel.

“Look homeward, angel,” is a line from the great English poem “Lycidas,” but what Wolfe also had in mind was a real stone angel that was carved by his father and stood in the boardinghouse yard. It was eventually purchased by a minister to adorn the grave of his wife in Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, 22 miles south of Asheville.

Eight miles further south, on U.S. 64, is the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site in Flat Rock. On nearby Little River Road is the 240-acre farm, Connemara, where Sandburg lived for his last 22 years.

In 1945, Sandburg’s reverberating poem, “Chicago,” was behind him; “Pasture Corner” was ahead. He said he needed room for his books, and his wife needed space to raise her prize-winning goats. Here in a comfortable house once owned by the treasurer of the Confederacy, Sandburg wrote history, autobiography and poems amid amiable clutter, playing his guitar for relaxation and the entertainment of visiting friends.

Tours of Connemara are led by park rangers who also show a film and conduct songfests in the shed. We wandered the grounds at will, advised only that “farm animals can bite.”

Down the road about 100 yards is the Flat Rock Playhouse, since 1961 the State Theater of North Carolina. It was recently named one of the 10 best summer theaters in the United States. Other theaters are at Boone, Burnsville and, of course, Asheville.

Wolfe had set out to be a playwright and was encouraged by his professors at Chapel Hill and Harvard--where he attended graduate school and studied in the famous 47 Workshop--but he failed. Disciplined writing was never his forte. It took his mistress, Aline Bernstein, and his editor, Scribners’ Maxwell Perkins, to harness his genius in the novel.

Twenty-two miles west of Hendersonville on U.S. 64 is Brevard, a pretty college town with a first-rate public library and bookstore as well as an outdoor summer concert series that attracts students and famous international performers. The Brevard Music Center is in a setting so bucolic it has been called “Tanglewood of the South.”

A few years ago the town was named No. 1 in the country by Rand McNally as an ideal place for retirees, a designation that appalled local residents anxious to protect the diversity of ages and classes within their community.

Brevard is at the entrance of the Pisgah National Forest, once a part of the extended Vanderbilt estate. Roadside picnic areas link a series of more than a dozen waterfalls, and at Sliding Rock, children line up waiting to go down nature’s own water slide.

Forty miles further southwest on U.S. 64 lies the artists’ town of Highlands, where there are good inns as well as galleries. From there we took Highway 28 about 20 miles northwest to Franklin, where one can--for a price--dig for rubies, garnets, sapphires and other gems in that area’s once commercially profitable mines.

Going on, we angled north on U.S. 441 for 31 miles through the Nantahala National Forest to Cherokee, reservation home of the Eastern band of that Native American nation, before returning to Asheville 48 miles east via the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We might have gone even farther without leaving the literary loop. In the western Nantahala Forest near the Tennessee line is the wilderness preserve named for Joyce Kilmer, the poet who wrote “Trees.”

However, we were content to linger in Cherokee and see the outdoor theater production “Unto These Hills,” the moving story of the tribe’s forced march along the “Trail of Tears” to present-day Oklahoma in 1838-39. The original score was composed by Jack Kilpatrick, a Cherokee.

For all its heartache, the tribe was blessed by genius. The scholar Sequoyah (1760-1843) invented Cherokee writing, translated the Bible, wrote books, published a newspaper and made his people literate when many of their white conquerors were not. In Asheville, the roof of the city hall is in the shape of Sequoyah’s Cherokee turban.

As for George Vanderbilt, master of “the nation’s largest private residence,” he spoke eight languages, preferred books over society and brought both rare first-editions and a 20,000-volume reading library with him to his mansion in the highlands.

His wife, Edith, worked to revitalize indigenous mountain handcrafts, especially weaving. Richard Morris Hunt designed their opulent home, and Frederick Law Olmstead created the magnificent gardens. Since 1930, the estate--including the greenhouse and 55 rooms in the residence--has been open to the public. Scott Fitzgerald must have visited and found it inspirational.

If Thomas Wolfe’s muse lived in quite a different neighborhood, this was Asheville, too. In fact, a case might be made for calling the city and its surrounding region a literary microcosm of the period.

Wolfe wrote his last novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” after he left Asheville for the last time. It is a haunting book, and even those who never read it have felt the uneasy truth of the title. No matter. Today, in his city with its see-for-miles fresh air, its easy access to deep woods, creative handcrafts, good music, theater and recreation, you can read another message.

It looked a lot like “Come Again” to me.

GUIDEBOOK

Asheville

Getting there: Asheville is served by United, Delta and USAir. By automobile, it is at the junction of three scenic highways: the Blue Ridge Parkway, U.S. 74 and Interstate 40, and is also the northern terminus of Interstate 26.

Where to stay: The Grove Park Inn and Country Club, 290 Macon Ave., Asheville 28804, (800) 438-5800 or (704) 252-2711 is the town’s legendary resort. The old wing has original Mission-style furniture, and one can ask for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s room. The new wing has the best views. Price: $115-$185 for most rooms, double occupancy. The Asheville Chamber of Commerce, 151 Haywood St., Asheville, N.C. 28802, (704) 258-3858, has a list of area B&Bs; including, in Highlands: Chandler Inn, U.S. 64, (704) 526-5992; $48-$92 double with breakfast, and the Old Edwards Inn, Fourth and Main streets, (704) 526-5036; $65-$75 double with breakfast.

Where to eat: In Asheville, Brenna’s at the Haywood Park, 1 Battery Park, (704) 252-2612; continental cuisine, moderate to expensive. The Windmill European Grill, 766 Haywood St., (704) 253-5285; Native American specialties on weekends, moderate.

The Deerpark, a former barn bordering a garden courtyard at Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate, has good salads and continental cuisine but is reserved for ticketed estate visitors only; moderate to expensive. In Highlands, the Central House at Old Edwards Inn, (704) 526-5036; Southern food, moderate.

For more information: Contact Asheville Travel & Tourism, P.O. Box 1011, Asheville 28802, (800) 257-1300.