It was assumed at both UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro that among the students there would be important future writers.

When I reread Wolfe in the 1980s I was reminded how much he is the poet of the town, of the city of Asheville, and of the university. The mountains themselves are in the distant background, and the mountain people are in the distant background. The mountain folk are the mother’s gaunt and somewhat sinister relations in the hills back of beyond. The mountain coves and peaks are glimpsed from the train and from the city square. Here is a passage describing Gant’s arrival in the mountains. “Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor” (p. 8).

And once Gant enters the remote beauty of the mountains and settles in the village of Altamont, he meets Eliza Pentland from back in those mysterious hills. They become engaged and he is taken to meet the Pentland family.

…and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught.
And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth. (p. 15)

From the first reading I was struck by the accuracy of Wolfe’s portrayal of certain aspects of the mountain people. I had grown up in small, hot rooms listening to my elders tell stories of grief and sickness and death. But I had never thought the habit peculiar to mountain people until Wolfe pointed it out with his satire. Wolfe is particularly good at selecting real traits and characteristics and exaggerating them for effect. The mournfulness, the relish for tales of misery and sickness and death were so much a part of the world I had grown up in that I had never thought them notable. Reading Thomas Wolfe I learned something about myself. But instead of the Byronic observer I thought I was at fifteen, I later saw I was one of those whittling by the fire and telling those stories of mourning and death. Those people were my people and their stories were my stories. I had learned from Wolfe almost the opposite of what I thought I had. It was not Wolfe’s “poetry” that inspired me, but the world of the mountain people, so haunted and sinister in his writing, but which I wanted to write about from inside. I did not want to satirize or be ironic. I wanted to let those people tell their own stories in their own idiom. The lost language I wanted to recover was the living language of a culture almost vanished when I was a child. I wanted to capture that lost language with the same artistry and seeming naturalness with which young Greeley played the violin.

Among Wolfe’s shorter works is a novella called “The Web of Earth.” This story is spoken entirely by a woman narrator talking to her son about their family, about gossip from home, about the late father.