Thomas Wolfe’s Dixieland, Thomas Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home

by Francis McGovern
The Old Kentucky Home, known as "Dixieland" in the novel Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, is located at 48 Spruce Street in downtown Asheville. The novel is autobiographical and Wolfe presents Dixieland more as a prison than a home, which has the protagonist, Eugene Gant, by the soul. Wolfe had a love hate relationship with the house, his family and the town. It seems more fitting rather, that he would have torn it down, surely in regret, only to have built it back up again.
The home and adjacent area have now become The Thomas Wolfe Memorial. The Memorial is a wide bri...