Big man on campus
Novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe's four years at Carolina shaped his mind and literary works.
One of the University’s most famous graduates didn’t really want to come here.
Future novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe of Asheville had his heart set on going to Princeton University or perhaps the University of Virginia. But – much like his thinly disguised alter ego, Eugene Gant, in Look Homeward, Angel – his father decided otherwise.
“He will go where I send him or not at all.” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly. Thus it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.
And so, 100 years ago this month, Wolfe boarded a train in Asheville, bound for Chapel Hill. He arrived on campus Sept. 12, 1916, a precocious, gangly youth with a baby face atop a 6-foot-3-inch frame. He was only 15 and still growing.
The next four years would shape Wolfe’s mind and his work, a process documented in Thomas Wolfe Undergraduate by Richard Walser and Thomas Wolfe: Carolina Student by Abigail Boyd Adams. The highly autobiographical author himself confirms Carolina’s impact in his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). (A centennial 2000 edition of Wolfe’s original manuscript, which he called O Lost, restored 60,000 words that had been cut to produce Look Homeward, Angel.) Both versions include descriptions of Eugene Gant at “Pulpit Hill” and his interactions there with influential fellow students and professors.
At first, Wolfe didn’t feel he fit in at college. He had spent the last four years in a private school in Asheville, being tutored in Latin, Greek and literature, voraciously reading any book he could find. The last of eight children, young Tom was the only one to be sent to college by his family. He was so much younger than the other college students that he was often the butt of practical jokes and pranks pulled by upperclassmen.
Eugene’s first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain and failure.
In the novel, Eugene rails against the State University as a place where mediocre minds became lawyers, businessmen and politicians. He pokes fun at its humble architecture and cheap food, but soon falls under the spell of the University and the neighboring town of “Pulpit Hill.”
The university was a charming, an unforgettable, place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big state. … In this pastoral setting, a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years.
