Thomas Wolfe's Angel - and I

Thomas Wolfe - not many people have heard of him in America let alone England. The more famous writer Tom Wolfe was actually named after him, but have no fear as to who is the great writer - the man with the full name! Thomas Wolfe was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and actually shared the same editor, Maxwell Perkins, but has been forgotten unlike his fellow writers, mainly because Wolfe wrote sprawling prose that was hard to group into a novel structure. He essentially wrote one long novel of his life which Perkins had to struggle to make into material the publishing industy could call novels.

Above is me at a memorial to Wolfe's first and greatest novel, Look Homeward, Angel, the title taken from Milton Lycidas. I am in Wolfe's hometown of Ashville, North Carolina, the subject of his novel. The people in the novel were drawn from real life and the townfolk were very upset with Wolfe - except when he became famous and they were suddenly proud to be on the map!