Thomas Wolfe boyhood home reopens

ASHEVILLE, N.C., April 28 (UPI) -- The North Carolina home where novelist Thomas Wolfe grew up reopened to the public last weekend in time for the spring tourist season.

The home in Asheville had been closed for repairs to damage caused by arson in 1998.

The 121-year-old Queen Anne-style house has 29 rooms and was operated as a boarding house by Wolfe's mother, Julia Wolfe. It has been meticulously restored to the state it was when Wolfe (1900-1938) lived there until 1916 when he left to study at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The property is a National Historic Landmark.

Wolfe wrote unkindly of his old home, known as Old Kentucky Home, in his 1929 autobiographical novel, "Look Homeward, Angel" in which he pictured a tormented youth named Eugene Gant growing up in as a dingy Dixieland boarding house in the town of Altamont in the state of Catawba. The sequel to the book was "Of Time and the River."

Wolfe was also known or his novel "You Can't go Home Again."

The Wolfe homestead is a major attraction in Asheville for tourists who come to the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains to see displays of azalea and rhododendron in the spring and fall foliage colors in the autumn.