The Thomas Wolfe House, also known as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, is a historic house and museum located at 52 North Market Street in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The American author Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) lived in the home during his boyhood.
The two-story frame house was built in 1883, influenced by the Queen Anne Style of architecture. By 1906, when Wolfe's mother, Julia E. (Westall) Wolfe (1860-1945), bought the house, it was a boarding house named Old Kentucky Home. She soon went to live at her business with Tom, while the other Wolfes remained at their Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived at the boarding house until he went to the University of North Carolina in 1916. Julia Wolfe enlarged the house in 1917 by adding five rooms.
Wolfe used the house as the setting for his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Changing the name of his mother's boarding house to "Dixieland" in his autobiographical fiction, he incorporated his own experiences among family, friends and boarders into the book.
The Thomas Wolfe House was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 11, 1971.
Famous quotes containing the words thomas, wolfe and/or house:
“The conversation of prayers about to be said
Turns on the quick and the dead....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“When cups went round at close of day
Is not that how good stories run?
The gods were sitting at the board
In their great house at Slievenamon.
They sang a drowsy song, or snored,
For all were full of wine and meat.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)