News Release

THOMAS WOLFE’S LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
AND HIS CHILDHOOD HOME, THE “OLD KENTUCKY HOME”

One of America’s most evocative writers, Thomas Wolfe drew inspiration from his southern roots, particularly his mother's rambling Asheville boarding house. Considered one of literature's most famous landmarks, the old Victorian home once known as the “Old Kentucky Home” today is the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site.

Wolfe immortalized the house as the fictional “Dixieland” in his epic autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. In the book, the character of Eliza Gant operates a boarding house modeled on the “Old Kentucky Home” run by Julia Wolfe. Here Wolfe resentfully spent much of his youth, forced to make his home among boarders rather than in a family home, just as the character of the young Eugene did later on in the novel.

A classic of American literature, “Look Homeward, Angel” has never gone out of print since its publication in 1929, keeping interest in Wolfe alive and attracting visitors to the setting for this great novel. Here is how the writer described the fictional “Dixieland”:

“It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young maples.

“The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped upon a dozen rotting columns of white-washed brick, fourteen feet high.

“She had added a large sleeping-porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and extended the hallway, added three bedrooms, two baths, and a watercloset, on the other. Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large sun-parlor under the sleeping porch, knocked out the archway in the dining-room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy. The construction was after her own plans, and of the cheapest material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering….

“At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labeled, half-filled medicine bottles.

“[Eugene] went out and began to mount the dark stairs. Benjamin Gant, entering at this moment, stumbled across a mission-chair in the hall…. Eugene paused, then mounted softly the carpeted stair, so that he would not be heard, entering the sleeping-porch at the top of the landing on which he slept….He did not turn on the light, because he disliked seeing the raw blistered varnish of the dresser and the bent white iron of the bed. It sagged, and the light was dim – he hated dim lights, and the large moths, flapping blindly around on their dusty wings.”

For more information on “Look Homeward, Angel” and the Wolfe home, contact Site Manager Steve Hill at 828-253-8304 or Steve@wolfememorial.com. Photos are available at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/hs/wolfe/wolfe.htm.

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