A New Year for Thomas Wolfe: 1937
“I’m not afraid of being tarred and feathered and run out of town anymore,” said the huge shaggy-headed fellow who is North Carolina’s best known and undoubtedly, greatest novelist.
Thomas Wolfe’s New Year of 1937 began in New Orleans where the city was full of visitors for the Sugar Bowl, a football match between the LSU Tigers and the Santa Clara Broncos. He found lodging at the 1893 hotel Roosevelt, where he was quickly discovered and inundated by visitors of his own. After a busy week, he moved briefly to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and then on to Atlanta. He considered a return to Asheville but instead headed for Chapel Hill, where he had not visited since his graduation in 1920. The Raleigh Bureau of the Asheville Citizen reported on January 21, 1937, that Thomas Wolfe was in the city and planning to go back to Asheville. The story continues:
He wagged his big head and raked his fingers through his hair nervously as he thought about it — — how he wrote his first novel and a sensationally successful one, ‘Look Homeward, Angel,’ about the people of Asheville and Chapel Hill and Raleigh.
And how he felt when he got that first letter, over seven years ago, from an old lady in Asheville who has seen an advance copy of the book, an old lady who always thought he was the finest boy of all. And — — If Asheville took it hard, Wolfe said, that was nothing compared to the way I took it. You know, you only have one home and one state, and, when they take that away from you, well — — if Asheville is willing to call it a draw, I certainly am.
In Thomas Wolfe’s defense, the reporter notes, “Since Look Homeward, Angel appeared, Asheville has been through a boom and a depression, worse calamities than having a book written about one. And Tom Wolfe’s older, too. 36 now And I’ve learned a lot of things, he said. Another book or two and many short stories, most of them published in Scribner’s have been added to his list of publications.”
No doubt the old lady Wolfe refers to in the article is his beloved teacher Margaret Roberts who, upon reading Look Homeward, Angel, wrote in a letter to Wolfe, “You have crucified your family and devastated mine.”
The report adds, “For months, he has been slaving at a new novel, to be published in April. When he’s finished with it, he’s going back to Asheville, back to the mountains in the spring. His new novel has been tentatively named the ‘The Hound of Darkness,’ but the name may be changed by the publisher, he explained. His visit to Raleigh and North Carolina at this gray season was an afterthought.” The article ends by quoting Thomas Wolfe as saying, “Someday . . . I’m going back to Yancey County, where my mother’s family came from, to live.”
By the end of January 1937, Thomas Wolfe was back in New York. Instead of completing The Hound of Darkness, he began to outline a book to be titled The Life and Times of Joseph Doaks. In need of money, he also returned to writing several more short stories, among them some of his better works: “The Child by Tiger” and “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” And apparently, you can go home again, as Wolfe was soon headed south again. By the end of April 1937, he was in Burnsville in Yancey County, and then on to Asheville in the first week of May.
Source: Asheville Citizen-Times 22 Jan 1937
