The dining area (rebuilt after a fire in 1998) includestables set with Limoges china, silverware, and linens that
were typical department store staples for the time. The
kitchen contains the original two stoves, cookware, and a
blue-and-white linoleum mat on the floor that is based on a
swatch found behind a baseboard. For the first few years,
Julia and Thomas shared a room at the front of the house
until she moved into a tiny bedroom off the kitchen. Once
she cast him off into the house, he slept wherever a bed
was open.
Thomas lived there from the age of six until he left forthe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1916. He
felt he had become a vagabond with no bedroom or even a
blanket of his own. “He very much resented that he was
brought here to live with strangers and that he was
separated from his father’s home, which he remembered
as a place of warmth and abundance,” says Tom. He spent
a good bit of time in the local library reading as an escape.
After college, Thomas studied playwriting at HarvardUniversity for three years, but eventually realized his style
was too cumbersome for the stage. His first novel,
an 825-page epic initially called O Lost, was trimmed
significantly and renamed Look Homeward, Angel. It was
published when he was 29. He did return to Asheville in
1937 and, for the most part, was greeted graciously. For
many, his huge popularity as a celebrity author outweighed
their dismay over any public humiliation from the book.
About a year after his homecoming, 37-year-oldThomas died of tuberculosis, a disease doctors believed he
contracted as a youth that became active when he got a
respiratory infection. He wrote three other novels: Of Time
and the River (1935) and two published posthumously,
The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again
(1940). He was often considered in a league with literary
giants F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and the
three shared the brilliant editor Maxwell Perkins of
Scribner’s. It was Maxwell, one of Thomas’s dearest
friends and executor of his estate, who insisted on cutting
large portions of Look Homeward, Angel to make it easier
to market.
The posthumous novels were edited by Tennessean andfellow Harvard alum Edward Aswell of Harper and
Brothers, with whom Thomas had begun working shortly
before his death after a falling out with Maxwell and
Scribner’s. Both editors urged Thomas to give fictitious
names to his characters to avoid lawsuits from those
described so meticulously in his tomes.
Julia resided at Old Kentucky Home until she died in- Thomas’s surviving siblings worked to create the
memorial, which opened four years later. “They made sure
the original furniture was here and rooms were arranged
the way they remembered them to be, and, in some cases,
arranged to tell a story they thought was important to
tell,” says Tom. The family recorded stories that can be
heard in the visitor center at the memorial.
Also on display are a recently acquired portrait of the
six-foot, six-inch Thomas, some of his clothing, furniture,
and details of his most intimate relationships, including his
long-term affair with New York stage and costume
designer Aline Bernstein. Among the events sponsored by
the memorial are biannual tours of Asheville-area
cemeteries where the locals who inspired Thomas’s
characters are buried, and his descriptions of them are
read aloud.
The memorial, like the novels, tells the story of what
Tom describes as a “young man who, against great odds,
wanted to become an artist. In order to do that, he had to
escape his crazy family and the tumult of this house and
get an education.” While Thomas did escape for a time, he
learned later that you might indeed want to go home again.
For information, visit wolfememorial.com.