Thomas Wolfe

I follow a very predictable pattern on Saturdays: morning coffee at the local Atlanta Bread Company while reading a big Victorian novel (currently Can You Forgive Her?); errands including picking up and dropping off drycleaning; a stop at the Appleton Public Library to refuel on books, DVDs (they have a great collection which I fully avail myself of even though I'm also an enthusiastic Netflix subscriber), CDs -- I always have the maximum 75 allowed items out! For lunch on Saturdays, I stop at the food court of the Fox River Mall -- not my favorite place generally, but Kato's Cajun offers a whopping big plate of fried rice for $1.99, and who can beat that? I was settling in with my rice and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night yesterday when a woman at the next table spotted the book and suddenly asked me, "Have you ever heard of Thomas Wolfe?"

It turned out that she had recently visited Asheville and had been to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, the boarding house he grew up in (as well as to the Biltmore estate, Asheville's other famous attraction). I got into a lively conversation with her and a younger woman (her daughter-in-law, I think) about Wolfe and Fitzgerald and that whole era of American writing. So it is possible to have a cultural encounter even at a commercial cathedral like the Fox River Mall! Just be carrying the right book.

It got me to thinking that I need to re-visit Wolfe. I read Look Homeward, Angel with great pleasure a number of years ago, and followed it with David Herbert Donald's excellent biography of Wolfe, Look Homeward, and Wolfe's essay The Story of a Novel and his play Welcome to Our City. One of the issues that came up during the lunch conversation is how ironic it is that Wolfe is now Asheville's most celebrated son, because at the time he was publishing the residents of the city weren't too fond of him -- his characters were mostly based quite transparently on real individuals, often portrayed none too flatteringly.