In the Footsteps of Wolfe

Abstract

With this personal reminiscence in prospect I’ve been looking at a photograph of Thomas Wolfe as an undergraduate at Chapel Hill. Could this confident young man with pipe be the original of Eugene Gant? Creators often differ from the autobiographical characters they create. But this certainly isn’t the suffering ’Gene Gant of Look Homeward, Angel. Merle Leavitt Riggs, a New England-born schoolmarm, had migrated from New Hampshire to the Woman’s College of UNC, as it then was, and thither to our town. She taught me French and math and cultivated “intellectual curiosity.” I needed it. I was an under-read high-school sophomore, who spent most of my spare time drawing and painting and stuffing my mind with baseball lore. I aspired in that time of limitless ambition to be a great left-handed pitcher. Merle saved me from my adolescent self. She had a flair for the dramatic and one day intoned—I mean the word precisely—the first rhythmic lines of one of Wolfe’s short stories. That was the appetizer. Later she drew Look Homeward, Angel from the library shelves and told me that I must read it if I wanted to be a writer. I already had inky fingers from a summer job on the local semi-weekly. I did read it—and as I wrote on the seventieth anniversary of its publication, the effect was instantaneous.