Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born on this day in 1900 in Asheville, N.C. North Carolina’s most renowned writer, author of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again, is still celebrated in his hometown. Asheville is host this week to the Thomas Wolfe Festival, and the recently-restored Thomas Wolfe Memorial, site of Julia Wolfe’s former boarding house, remains a popular tourist destination and should be near the top of the to-do list of anyone visiting the Paris of the South.
One of the highlights of the Wolfe Festival will be Saturday night’s fundraising dinner at the Old Kentucky Home. Guests will be given a rare opportunity to eat in the original dining room of an early twentieth-century boarding house. They’ll be presented with a traditional menu, but hopefully it won’t stick too close to the sort of fare offered by the notoriously parsimonious Julia Wolfe.