Thomas Wolfe’s Angel

The angel statue immortalized in Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel, now marks a grave on the Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Set within the fictional city of Altamont, Catawba, Wolfe’s coming-of-age novel is intently based mostly on his household, neighbors, and upbringing in Asheville. Wolfe’s opus is replete with references to angels as symbols of unfulfilled hopes and goals alongside the less-than-flattering depictions of the Asheville citizenry within the early 1900s.

As within the novel, Wolfe’s father, W.O. Wolfe, was a stonecutter. He maintained a tombstone and monument store on the southeast nook of Pack Sq. in Asheville. The Jackson Constructing now stands on that spot. Western North Carolina’s cemeteries are filled with the grave inscriptions, tombstones, and markers he produced. Though an completed artisan, the senior Wolfe didn’t have the talent to carve an angel’s face. The stone angel that impressed the novel’s angel was ordered from New York and stood for a number of years on the porch of Wolfe’s store as an commercial.

Though data point out that Wolfe’s father offered at the very least a dozen Italian marble angels as grave markers, the angel in Hendersonville most intently matches the outline within the novel. Just like the fictional angel, “… it had come from Carrara, in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in a single hand. The opposite hand was lifted in benediction; it was poised delicately upon the ball of 1 phthisic foot…” W.O. Wolfe offered that angel to the Johnson household in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1906.    

The angel marks the grave of Margaret Bates Johnson, spouse of Rev. Dr. Henry Johnson. Though Johnson died on Could 26, 1905, in Brookhaven, Mississippi, she was reinterred within the Oakdale Cemetery in her hometown of Hendersonville. She rests subsequent to her husband.

In 1949, Myra Champion, a librarian and Wolfe scholar, decided that the Hendersonville angel is the one the creator referenced in his writings. A state historic marker describing the angel’s relationship to the novel stands on Freeway 64 subsequent to the cemetery. Sadly, Wolfe’s followers visiting the grave brought on harm to the statue’s hand and wing that required restore. A wrought iron fence now surrounds the graves and monument to guard the angel from additional hurt.

Whereas at Oakdale Cemetery, one may go to the grave of Leila Maud Davidson Hansell, the “Sunshine Woman.” Hansell was a tuberculosis affected person who feared spending eternity in darkness upon burial. When she died in December 1915, her husband interred her in an above-ground vault with glass prisms inlaid on the highest. The glass ensured that the solar would at all times shine on her. By 1937, Oakdale Cemetery caretakers grew weary of ghoulish guests to the gravesite making an attempt to view the corpse and coated the vault’s prime with cement. Coincidentally, Thomas Wolfe additionally died of tuberculosis in 1938 on the age of 37.