Thomas Wolfe House - Asheville, North Carolina - Literary Sites on Waymarking.com

"The home is located in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The sprawling frame of the Queen Anne-influenced house was originally only six or seven rooms with a front and rear porch when it was constructed in 1883 by prosperous Asheville banker, Erwin E. Sluder. By 1889, additions had more than doubled the size of the original structure, but the architecture changed little over the next 27 years. In Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe accurately remembered the house he moved into in 1906 as a "big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms." In 1916, Wolfe's mother enlarged and modernized the house, adding electricity, additional indoor plumbing, and 11 rooms.

Today the boardinghouse where Thomas Wolfe spent his childhood and adolescence feature furnishings that evoke the daily routine of life in both fact and fiction. In Wolfe's second novel, Of Time and the River (1935), 14 years before the "Old Kentucky Home" became a memorial, Wolfe already had intuitively assessed the house's true importance. He said his mother's "old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum." It is preserved almost intact with original furnishings arranged by family members very much the way it appeared when the writer lived there. Memories, kept alive through Wolfe's writings, remain in each of the home's 29 rooms.

Thomas Wolfe was perhaps the most overtly autobiographical of this country's major novelists. His boyhood at 48 Spruce Street shaped his work and influenced the rest of his life. So frank and realistic were his reminiscences that Look Homeward, Angel was banned from Asheville's public library for over seven years. Today Wolfe is celebrated as one of Asheville's most famous citizens, and his boyhood home has become a part of our nation's literary history.

Of Time and the River was a continuation of Look Homeward, Angel and Wolfe's last two major novels (published posthumously), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), followed the events of his life in New York and Brooklyn, his wandering travels through Europe, his success as a novelist, and his final sad revelation of "you can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe died in the prime of his life of tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938, 18 days short of his 38th birthday.

Wolfe's mother lived in the "Old Kentucky Home" until her death in 1945. Four years later her surviving sons and daughters sold the house to a private organization, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association, and it opened to the public as a house museum on July 19, 1949. The association continued to operate the memorial until 1958, when it was taken over by the City of Asheville. On January 16, 1976, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources acquired the property."

Short Description: A stop on the Thomas Wolfe Trail in downtown Asheville,NC Book Title: Look Homeward, Angel First Year Published: 1929 Author's Name: Thomas Wolfe Name of Waymarked Item: Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home Location of Item: 52 N Market Street, Asheville, NC More Information: Plaque out front of the home says it all: "Asheville native, Thomas Wolfe achieved international fame with the publication of his first full novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” in 1929. Many of the incidents in the book took place in his mother’s boardinghouse, “Old Kentucky Home,” which he called 'Dixieland.' A large man, both in stature and in accomplishment, Wolfe left big shoes to fill. Placed by the Four Seasons Garden Club.” Admission Price?: 0.00 (listed in local currency) Link to more information about the book or waymarked item.: Not listed

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