He desires to encompass, to unite both sides of himself. He was an odd combination of youthfulness with profound learning and wisdom. He published his most famous book in 1929, and died young, with great unfinished projects in fragments.

Besides Wolfe, the other local writer often in the news when I was young was Carl Sandburg, who lived in the old Memminger house in nearby Flat Rock. Like Wolfe, Sandburg had a vast popular audience. Without knowing it at the time, I think I acquired from both local celebrities the sense that the best writing is poetic and for the larger audience of ordinary readers. Accessibility to the common reader has always been my goal and my challenge, in writing both poetry and prose. I feel fortunate to have had such models when I was so young.

I myself did not reread Thomas Wolfe for almost twenty years. I had gone on to discover the precise understatement of Hemingway, the fury of Faulkner, the tragic romances of Fitzgerald. But when I returned to Look Homeward, Angel in the early 1980s, I was pleased to discover that the novel still worked its spell on me. The cadences of the language, the richness of diction, the passion of the narration, the detail of boyhood and small-town life early in the century were just as vivid as they had been in my teens. But what was different in my rereading was the emphasis. At the age of thirty-six the choral sections, the rhapsodic passages, seemed less interesting than the realism and satire. The satire was extraordinarily entertaining and on the mark. Wolfe is particularly good at finding what is absurd about small-town life, and in the speech of store clerks, local politicians, reporters, blowsy widows, he captures the spirit of an era. The work is alive and moving. But it seemed a very different book from what I had read in 1960. I had grown up to see new facets in the novel.

I know that Thomas Wolfe is very much out of fashion now among academic critics. A few years ago Harold Bloom began a review of Wolfe’s letters with the sentence, “One cannot discuss the literary merits of Thomas Wolfe; he has none.” My friends from Yale never pass up an opportunity to express their disdain for my fellow Tarheel.

While rereading Look Homeward, Angel it occurred to me, however, that Wolfe has suffered a fate among academic critics similar to their treatment of Poe. His great fame and popularity, his legend and notoriety, were held against him. Wolfe was so famous in his own lifetime there has been a backlash against him ever since. And like Poe, he is read by the young, and cherished by the young. Scholars are often embarrassed by their own early enthusiasms, feeling that what they cared for so much when young can’t be taken seriously later.

But since rereading Look Homeward, Angel I have noticed his influence on so many other writers, including James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, Jack Kerouac, and Cormac McCarthy, to name a few. Of the novelists of the early twentieth century only Hemingway and Faulkner have had a greater impact on the following generations.

I am often asked why there are so many important writers from North Carolina. There may be more well-known fiction writers and poets per capita from North Carolina than from any other state, unless it’s Mississippi. My short answer is: Thomas Wolfe. Once Wolfe achieved such great fame in the 1930s, other young North Carolinians got the idea that writing was an opportunity, a real possibility. The same is probably true of Faulkner and Mississippi. Once a region or a state has an extremely famous writer, other writers are likely to follow. But the recognition and encouragement North Carolina has given its writers is a factor also. When I was a student at NC State and then UNC-Chapel Hill in the 1960s, there was a feature almost every Sunday in the Raleigh News & Observer about one North Carolina writer or another: Frances Grey Patton, Guy Owen, Reynolds Price, Doris Betts, Romulus Linney.