Chang and Eng Were Sideshow Freaks Who Became Southern Aristocrats

 

     

                                                Chang and Eng as young men on exhibition in Asia. 

On August 16, 1829 two young immigrant brothers arrived in Boston.  Nothing much unusual in that, except that instead of being Europeans they were from the Kingdom of Siam.  And, by the way, they were co-joined twins, linked at the sternum by a sliver of cartilage and a bit of liver, although each man had a complete and fully functioning organ.  They came to America, like so many other immigrants, to seek their fortune.  They did better than most.  Their story says a lot about 19th Century America, class, and race.

Chang and Eng were born to a village fisherman and his wife, both of Chinese origin, on May 11, 1811.  Other than the narrow strip that united them, they were normal and healthy babies.  As children they were lively and noted for their intelligence.  But they were always a curiosity.  In their native land they were called Chinese twins because of their ethnicity.  They were already making a living by showing themselves when they were “discovered” in Bangkok by British seaman Robert Hunter who successfully exhibited them on a world tour that eventually brought them to Boston. 

They were quick to learn English and eventually learned to both read and write.  They were also shrewd businessmen and once liberated from Hunter’s contract, marketed their own careers.  They toured extensively appearing in both “native” costume and in the dress of respectable Western gentlemen. 

As their English improved they added a lecture, tales of their travels and adventures, and answered questions from the audience, bantering back and forth freely with them.  In 1839 they took the savings from ten years on the road and bought a farm near Wilkesboro, North Carolina, became American citizens, and legally adopted the English surname Bunker.  Again, they did well, soon expanding their holdings to a plantation and buying slaves to work it.  Chang and Eng were well thought of, even respected, by their neighbors.  Perhaps because Asians were so rare, they do not seem to have ever been the victims of racial prejudice in their adopted home.   

On April 13, 1843 Chang wed Adelaide Yates and Eng her sister Sarah.  The two couples shared an extra large bed. They retired from show business to devote themselves to their plantation and to raising families.  Chang and his wife had 10 children; Eng and his wife had 11.  In time, the stress of such a large household set the two sisters to squabbling.  

 

Chang and Eng Bunker with their feuding wives Adelaide (left) and Sara (right) with two their children in mid life.   

Each brother purchased his own plantation near Mount Airy, North Carolina—the same town later to become famous as the inspiration for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry.  The couples and their broods would spend three days at one home, where the wife could be undisputed queen of the household, then spend the next three days at the other.  One imagines that the situation was far from ideal, but it served them well. 

As their oldest sons neared college age, they decided to come out of retirement to raise money for their education.  In 1860 they signed on with the greatest American showman, Phineas T. Barnum, who featured them at his American Museum.  But Barnum’s ardently Unionist views and support of abolition, clashed with the Bunker brother’s devotion to the Confederacy. 

Soon they were back home and instead of going to college Chang’s son Christopher and Eng’s son Stephen both joined the Rebel army.  At war’s end the two families had lost their slaves and much of the estates they had worked to build. 

 

                                           A British colored wood cut by by H.S. Miller of Chang and Eng in their post-Civil War comeback.

Both men were very bitter and like many of their neighbors became ardent champions of the Lost Cause.  After the war to recoup their losses they again resorted to public exhibitions but were not very successful.  American taste in entertainment was drifting away from fascination with freaks.  They would have done better to re-unite with Barnum and perhaps join his new venture, a traveling circus. 

On January 17, 1874 Eng awoke to find his brother dead. He refused and emergency operation to be separated from his dead brother and died three hours later. Chang’s wife died in 1892 and Eng’s wife lived on until 1917. 

Their many children mostly prospered and many folks in North Carolina can trace heritage to the brothers.  Contemporary descendants include Air Force Major General Caleb V. Haynes and Adelaide “Alex” Sink, the former Chief Financial Officer of Florida, and the Democratic candidate for governor in 2010.  

 

Some of Chang and Eng's many descendants visited the monument to their ancestor in Samut Songkhram, Thailand in 2017. 

The story of Chang and Eng continues to fascinate.  Mark Twain based his short story The Siamese Twins on them.  A Singapore musical, Chang & Eng premiered in 1997 and has been performed with great success across Asia.  In 2000 Darin Strauss published an award-winning bestselling novel, Chang and Eng which actor/producer Gary Oldman tried to develop for the screen.

 

A Carolina Tribe Whooped the Klan—An Apt Lesson for Native American History Month

 

 

Lumbee tribe members surround a  Ku Klux Klan rally meant to intimidate them in rural North Carolina.

The area around Maxton, North Carolina was not typical of the Deep South in the 1950's when Jim Crow law were beginning to be challenged by the emerging Civil Rights Movement.  The population split between Whites, African-Americans, and a distinct Native American tribe included members also descended from the other two races.  They had lived side by side if not together, and not without difficulties, but on the whole amicably for more than 200 years.

The region, tucked away by the South Carolina border, was divided by Robeson and Scotland Counties where the Coastal Plane begins to fade into the Piedmont.  Settlements there by mostly Scottish colonists as early as 1775 identified four villages  or clans of Siouian-speaking communities.  The people began to call themselves Lumbee for the Lumber River that flowed through their hunting grounds. During the American Revolution both Anglos and natives enlisted, mostly in the State Militia.  So did sizable numbers of Free Blacks.  Pension records show that several members of known Lumbee families were listed as Free Blacks, evidence of intermarriage.

Robeson and Scotland Counties by the South Carolina border right where it takes it turn due west.

In the late 18th Century Lumbee families began buying land, obtaining it as a veteran grant, and gaining, for the first time, legal ownership of traditional land.  Several families amassed substantial holdings and some owned slaves.  But the isolated area away from major river routes did not lend itself to large scale plantation system farming.  Most families in all groups were small, subsistence farmers, seasonal hunters, and hired laborers.

Isolation was good for the tribe.  They were not swept up by Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy.  In fact they were the largest remaining group north of Florida.  In the late 1830s and '40s they welcomed and absorbed Iroquoian speaking Tuscarora groups likewise stranded when the rest of their people were exiled west of the Mississippi.   

None-the-less when the State of North Carolina began adopting and enforcing Free Black Codes, the Lumbee were stripped of the citizenship rights they had long enjoyed including the rights to vote, purchase property, serve on a Jury, muster with the militia, or posses fire arms.  The enforcement of the fire arms ban was particularly galling because hunting was an important part of feeding their families.  Several prominent men were arrested, tried, and punished.

Like many small, non-slaveholders some local Whites and Natives resented the haughty Tidewater aristocracy that drove secession and Civil War.  Some were avowed Unionists or sympathizers and avoided Confederate Service and war taxes.  When the South enacted a draft, some fled into the woods and back country including those sheltered by the Lumbee.

Other members of the tribe, however, remained loyal to their state and the Confederacy and served in the war.  Northern forces never came near the remote area.  But after the war most Lumbee supported Democrats because they resented the Reconstruction 40 Acres and a Mule for Freemen but did not include those living as members of the tribe.  In fact, the Federal government refused to recognize them as a tribe.  

Under Republican control the State set up separate school for Whites and Blacks.   As non-whites were excluded from white schools and compelled to attend Freedman schools.  They began to campaign for their own schools.

They renamed the central market town originally named Shoe Hill to Tilden in honor of the Democratic Presidential Candidate who promised to end Federal occupation in the South.  Tilden won the popular vote but the election was among the most contentious in American history, and was only resolved by the Compromise of 1877 in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction  in exchange for recognition of his presidency.  Without Federal troops, Democrats quickly regained control of Southern governments and began enacting the Jim Crow laws that returned Blacks semi-servitude with no Civil Rights.

Men of the extended Lumbee Chavis family in traditional dress in the Post Civil War Era.  In their daily lives tribal members wore the same ordinary work clothing as their White neighbors, lived on their own farms, used Anglo style names, and commonly spoke.

As part of a reward for Lumbee support,  Democrats began to look for ways to created Native schools.  To do that they needed to officially recognize the tribe.  In the 1880s, as the Democratic Party was struggling against a biracial Populist movement which combined  poor Whites both Populist  and Democrats and Blacks Republicans the state recognized the Indian people of Robeson County as the Croatan Indians and to create a separate system of Croatan Indian schools.  Croatan referred to the once powerful native confederation around Roanoke in the earliest days of colonization.  There was no known connection between the Lumbee and that nation. By the end of the 19th century, they were legally known as Indians of Robeson County and had established schools in eleven of their principal settlements.  The town of Tilden was finally renamed Maxton.

The Lumbee and their Democratic Party allies in Congress campaigned unsuccessfully for decades in the 20th Century for Federal recognition as a tribe primarily to get support for their schools.  Repeatedly rebuffed they resorted to petitioning under the names Croaton Cherokee and later Croaton as Siouans to take advantage of those Western tribes' existing recognition.  They had no real connection to the Eastern Band of Cherokee in South Carolina who vigorously protested their claim and dim 200 year old connections to the Sioux.  Both claims were ignored.

The Croatan Normal School at Pembroke, North Carolina, 1916, the first Croatan (Lumbee) Indian school established and supported by the state.

In 1919 an agent of the Indian Office reported: 

While these Indians are essentially an agricultural people, I believe them to be as capable of learning the mechanical trades as the average white youth. The foregoing facts suggest the character of the educational institution that should be established for them, in case Congress sees fit to make the necessary appropriation, namely the establishment of an agricultural and mechanical school, in which domestic science shall also be taught.

Then in 1934 another agent reported:

I find that the sense of racial solidarity is growing stronger and that the members of this tribe are cooperating more and more with each other with the object in view of promoting the mutual benefit of all the members. It is clear to my mind that sooner of later government action will have to be taken in the name of justice and humanity to aid them.

 World War II put efforts for Federal recognition on hold while tribal members, like their White and Black neighbors, went into the service.  Near full domestic employment brought unheard of prosperity as other members left to work in defense industries in regional cities.  And when it was over returning GIs used their benefits to buy new homes, start small businesses, and attend college.  Although still poorer than the rest of the country, by 1950 most members were living in homes with electricity, running water, and telephones as well as owning a family car or truck.  Everyone had modern shot guns and varmint rifles for hunting--and self-defense.  That was resented by some whites who thought the native veterans were "uppity" and disrespectful.

In the immediate post-war years the bid for Federal recognition was put on hold during an internal dispute over what tribal name to request with factions favoring Croaton,  Cherokee-Coaton, or Cheraw [Souian].  What they agreed on was that they no longer wanted to be designated the Indians of Robeson County anymore, especially since their populations was spread far beyond that limited jurisdiction. 

In the early 1950s, Reverend D. F. Lowry organized the Lumbee Brotherhood. Lowry and his supporters contended that since their people were most likely the descendants of a mixture of colonial-era indigenous tribes—a theory many scholars supported—they should adopt the name Lumbee after the river that had become the cultural heart of the community. In 1952 members overwhelmingly voted to adopt the new name, and the North Carolina General Assembly changed their official designation in 1953 to the Lumbees.  That paved the way for Congressional action at last.

The Lumbee Act  passed by Congress in late May 1956 as a concession to political lobbying and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated the Lumbee as an Indian people. It withheld full recognition as a "Tribe", as had been agreed to by the Lumbee leaders. The Lumbee Act designated the Indians of Robeson, Hoke, Scotland, and Cumberland Counties as the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina.  But there was a catch.  The Act stipulated, "Nothing in this Act shall make such Indians eligible for any services performed by the United States for Indians because of their status as Indians." It also forbad a Government relationship with the Lumbee and banned  them from applying through  the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administrative process to gain recognition.  

The rational was The Lumbee had essentially assimilated into early colonial life prior to the formation of the United States. They lived as individuals, as did any other colonial and U.S. citizens. Lumbee spokesmen repeatedly testified at these hearings that they were not seeking federal financial benefits; they said they only wanted a name designation as Lumbee people.

The Blood Drop Cross logo used by the Ku Klux Klan represented the the "one drop rule" what classified any one with "even a single drop" of Black or Native blood could taint someone "passing" for White.  The multi-racial Lumbee were a prime example of that threat.

The fight for tribal identity put them in the spotlight, especially because tribal members were descended from Native, White, and Black individuals and there was still inter-racial marriage.  Playing on racial anxiety and resentment of Lumbee competition for jobs and property Grand Dragon of the Kights of the Ku Klux   began a campaign of harassment against the Lumbee, as mongrels and half-breeds  whose race mixing threatened to upset the established order of the Jim Crow South.  After giving a series of speeches denouncing the loose morals of Lumbee women, Cole burned a cross in the front yard of a Lumbee woman in St. Pauls as a warning. 

The Civil Rights Movement was gaining strength across the former Confederate states--the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision had just made segregated public schools illegal and Whites were turning to the once-again revived KKK.  Cole thought that an attack on the Lumbee would be easy pickings and a recruitment tool in North Carolina where Klan growth lagged behind neighboring states. He called for a Klan rally on January 18, 1958, near the Maxton. 

The Lumbee, led by veterans of World War II and Korea, decided to disrupt the rally.

 Cole had predicted more than 5,000 Klansmen would show up for the rally, but that night  fewer than 100 and possibly as few as three dozen attended.  Klansmen had prepared for the rally in a large field, with loudspeakers, a cross to be burned, and a large banner. Cole, who was from South Carolina, misunderstood the racial dynamics in Lumbee territory including relatively good relations with local Whites and the extent to which the tribe was prepared to defend itself and other indigenous people.

More than 500 Lumbee, armed with guns, sticks, and ax handles gathered in a nearby swamp.  When they realized they possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage, they attacked the Klansmen encircling the Klansmen, opening fire and wounding four  in the first volley, none seriously. 

Local newspaper headlines expressed astonishment at the rout of the Klan.

Local law enforcement showed up after the altercation had taken place, but by then, the field was clear.  It turned out that the long tribal support of Democrats and friendly ties with local authorities paid off.  The remaining Klansmen panicked and fled. Cole was found in the swamps, arrested and tried for inciting a riot.

The Lumbees gathered up discarded robes and the rally banner and marched back into Maxton to celebrate, which included burning Catfish Cole in effigy. Press coverage showcased two Lumbee men, one a celebrated World War II bomber engineer, wrapped in the KKK banner they had torn off a Klansmen’s car at the rally.

Simon Oxedine and Charlie Warriax, decorated WWII veterans, displaying their captured KKK flag at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.

The Lumbee celebrated the victory by burning Klan regalia and dancing around the open flames.

The Battle of Hayes Pond, or the Klan Run, as it came to be called, marked the end of Klan activity in Robeson County, is still celebrated as a Lumbee holiday.  

 

The ignominious route of the Klan was widely celebrated.  Later, in the 1960s it was held up as an example of armed self-defense as opposed to Martin Luther King's non-violence  by Black Power activists, the Black Panthers, and Nation of Islam as well as to the American Indian Movement.

In the 21at Century  many observers were shocked by shifting Lumbee political action.  Robeson County, the heart of Lumbee territory, was carried by Barack Obama by an 18 point margin in 2012 in 2016.  Four years later both Joe Biden and Donald Trump promised long-sought tribal recognition, but Trump  but the failure of Democratic administrations to actually accomplish it flipped the tribal vote and by an even wider margin in 2020 after a campaign rally circus at the Robson County Fair Grounds in Lumberton where the grandstand behind Trump's podium was salted by campaign with members waving bright red Lumbrees for Trump placards.

 

Lumbee showed support for Donald Trump at a 2020 campaign rally in Robeson County.

This year  Trump brought his act to the Aero Center near Wilmington International Airport.   Despite a record as President hostile to Native American tribal interests, he reiterated his support for recognition with tribal members John Cummings, a Robeson County Board Commissioner and other leaders.  Kamala Harris' attempts to reconnect to Native voters was not enough.  Trump carried Robeson County and other areas with strong Lumbee populations and helped tip the critical battleground state.  

There remains Democratic support among tribe members, the political shift is a reflection of the long-time Lumbree stratagy of forging unlikely partnerships with politicians who could best serve the tribes interests. 

 

Lumbee women and girls in procession at a tribal Pow Wow.
 

Today, the Lumbree are the second largest tribe in the United States behind the Navajo with more than 60,000 enrolled members in the original rural core as well as in urban centers including Baltimore, Maryland;  New Port News, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina.  They retain cultural adhesion.

Thomas Wolfe was the Novelist Who Could Not Go Home Again to Ashville

 

Thomas Wolfe's hometown and inspiration, Ashville, North Carolina, remains isolated by flood waters and destroyed highway access with widespread catastrophic damage a week after Hurricane Helene slammed the Piedmont highlands.

Note—The fate of novelist Thomas Wolfe’s childhood home and museum as well as other sites associated with his roman-a-clef novels in Ashville, North Carolina is not yet known.  Days after being devastated by Hurricane Helene the gem of the Piedmont remains isolated accessible only by air, foot, and boats.  Aerial footage of the devastation is not hopeful.  Now perhaps even Wolfe’s ghost cannot go home again.

It was 1966.  With typical ambition Elaine Zelznick, the young drama teacher and theater director at Niles West High School in Skokie, Illinois had selected a noted Broadway serious drama as the class play.  Look Homeward, Angel was a bittersweet but lyrical evocation of life in an early 20th Century small Southern city as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young man coming of age.  Ketti Frings adapted the well-known novel.  The play earned six Tony Award nominations and the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The leading role of Eugene Gant naturally went to the school’s acknowledged star Murray Moss, who both he and Miss Zelznick were convinced was the next Marlon Brando.  And he dazzled delivering lines of dialog that could and did move an audience to awe and tears.  I was given a small part as a townsman—so small that I can’t remember who I was playing.  Certainly less than six lines of dialogue.  But I was thrilled to be a part of a project that everyone involved took with high minded artistic convictions.

Joe Van Fleet as mother and Anthony Perkins as the stone carver's son Eugene Gant in the 1958 Broadway production of Look Homeward, Angel.

The Samuel French script from which we work noted that the play was based on a novel by someone named Thomas Wolfe.  I had never heard of him, but I searched out the fat book.  I found a paperback copy among my mother’s large collection of important or bestselling novels.  One evening I opened it up the book to the prelude:

. . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

 

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

 

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

 

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

 

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I was blown away as only a 17 year old can be blown away.  Awe struck.  I had never read prose like that.  I read all night getting maybe 200 hundred pages into the thickest novel I had ever seen.  And my life literally changed.  I wanted to do that.  I wanted more than anything to write with that kind of power and grandeur.  I wanted to be the next Thomas Wolfe, the next Great American novelist.

I was not the only one.  Wolfe had that effect on a lot of people, most notably Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth each of whom adored him.  Pat Conroy may have summed it up for the rest of them, “My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel.”

Of course, I never became a novelist, let alone a great one.  But I did spend years writing short stories that tried to capture that eloquence in a bottle.  But no one could match Wolfe, and it was fatal to try.  Would-be lyrical passages were too often simply florid and excessive.  It took time and a heavy dose of Ernest Hemmingway’s economical and pared down prose to strip the worst of it from my writing.

But regular readers of this blog and other scribblings might sometimes detect echoes of that rich and evocative language.  Forgive me.  Like malaria, you never quite get over Thomas Wolfe.

Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900 in the North Carolina Piedmont city of Asheville.  He was the youngest of eight and the closest child to his ambitious and domineering mother, the former Julia Elizabeth Westall.  She kept an upscale boarding house and dabbled, eventually successfully, in real estate.  His father William Oliver Wolfe was already 50 years old when his youngest son was born, and a decade older than his wife.  He was a stone carver and owned a monument company.  Both of them and his siblings became key characters in his autobiographical first novel.

The relationship between his parents had cooled.  When Julia Wolfe returned from a successful stay in St. Louis where she had operated a boarding house serving visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair, she used the money she had earned to buy a large new boarding house she named Old Kentucky Home at 48 Spruce Street in Asheville.  Julia moved in there with young Thomas while his father and the other children stayed in their old home.

The boy grew up in that house amid the mix of lodgers and visitors and the tension between his parents.  He idolized his father and his older brothers, particularly Ben, his closest sibling in age who was eight years older.  The boy must have been a sponge.  He absorbed it all, as well as life in Asheville and many of the town’s residents.

                             Wolfe in a University of North Carolina yearbook.

Wolfe was precocious enough, and his family prosperous enough, to enroll him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 15.  Despite his youth he was both a popular student and an academic standout.  He was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity.  He was recognized as an outstanding writer, rose to the editorship of the Daily Tar Heel, and was awarded a prize for a philosophic essay.

After the trauma of his brother Ben’s early death in 1918, Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting class.  The future master of descriptive prose was inspired to become a dramatist.  The Return of Buck Gavin his first one act play was one of the first produced by the newly formed Carolina Playmakers.  The troupe also staged another of his plays, The Third Night.

Wolfe graduated in 1920 and went on to Harvard University for graduate studies that fall where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Baker’s 47 Workshop, a student theatrical group which mounted plays developed in his classes, did two separate versions of Wolfe’s The Mountains in 1921.

Wolf earned his Master’s Degree in June of 1922.  His father died the same month, another shattering experience for the young man.  Despite the loss, he returned to Harvard for another year of work under Baker.  The 47 Workshop produced his most ambitious work yet, a 10 scene Welcome to Our City in May 1923.  The play drew attention beyond the University community.

In 1923 Wolfe received a modest stipend to go to New York City as a fund raiser for his original alma mater, the University of North Carolina.  The job left plenty of time for the young writer to try to peddle his plays to producers.  He had no luck.   In ’24 he took a teaching position at New York University, which would somewhat sporadically be his academic home for the next seven years.

For a short while in 1924 it looked like the Theater Guild might be willing to produce Welcome to Our City, but it was eventually rejected as too long and unwieldy.  Wolfe could not bring himself to cut the script to a more manageable length. 

Somewhat discouraged in October of ’24 Wolfe sailed for England and the Continent to expand his provincial horizons and work on his writing.  He had concluded that his talents lay not as a playwright, but as a novelist.  

                            Aline Bernsten, Wolfe's older lover and mentor.

Sailing home to New York in 1925 Wolfe met the beautiful, sophisticated, and intelligent older “Jewess” who became a tempestuous lover, muse, and mentor.  Aline Bernstein was a noted costume designer for the Theater Guild and the married mother of two.  She was 18 years older than her protégée.  The relationship was sometimes stormy and always intense.  But Bernstein encouraged the writer and promoted his career.  She became the model for Esther Jack, an important character in Wolf’s last three novels.

With her encouragement, Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926 where he began work on his highly experimental first epic novel, O Lost.  He completed a draft back in New York.  Aline helped get it into the hands Scribner’s, the most important literary publishing house in the country, already the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway.  His 1,100 page manuscript landed on the desk of the most respected editor in the business, Maxwell Perkins. 

Perkins immediately recognized that the book needed significant paring.  Despite Wolfe’s anguish, he cut well over half of the text, eliminating most of the experimental elements and concentrating on the autobiographical character of Eugene Gant.  Despite the ruthless editing, Wolfe grew close to Perkins and came to regard him as a surrogate father.  Perkins returned the affection and treated Wolfe like a son.

And not everything cut was lost.  Much of the material became the core of a second novel.

Legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins tamed a literal crate full of Wolfe's manuscript into Look Homeward, Angel and became a father figure to the writer. 

The book was published under the new title of Look Homeward, Angel just days before the stock market crash of 1929.  That might have affected sales.  The initial publication was only a modest commercial success.  But it was a critical triumph.  Praise was almost unanimous and unusually effusive, although some critics like Bernard DeVoto would come to praise Perkins’s editing over Wolfe’s undisciplined genius.  DeVoto later described the book as “hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribner’s.”

The publication certainly changed Wolfe’s life.  He was shocked by the angry reaction of his hometown of Asheville where over 200 of his family members and neighbors recognized themselves as characters in the novel.  Most were not pleased.  It caused a rift in his family, especially with his prickly mother.  Only one sister remained supportive.  He was the target of such invective that Wolfe was afraid to return to Asheville for eight years.

He dedicated the book to Bernstein but broke off his relationship with her shortly after it came out.  Depressed and drinking heavily Wolfe left for Europe supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.  There he found a warmer reception with the public.  The book was a best seller in England and its dense style meshed with German literary tastes.

Portrait of a young author. The poster boy for tortured genius novelists, Thomas Wolfe hemorrhaged gorgeous prose, lush descriptive passages, and sharp characterizations that others hammered into readable books.

Upon return using unpublished fragments of the first book and lots of new material, he produced another massive manuscript The October Fair continuing the story of Eugene Gant as he establishes a literary career and prominently featuring Esther Jack.  It was an arduous, four year process.  Wolfe worked in his Brooklyn apartment, writing long hand on legal tablets standing up and using the top of his refrigerator as a desk.

Once again Perking managed to wrest a single volume, Of Time and the River. The book was not only a critical success this time, but a popular one as well.  It shot to the top of the best seller lists in 1936.  Wolfe was acclaimed as one of the great writers of his generation, if not the greatest.  Peers like Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner joined in the chorus of cheers.

After the success of his second novel, Wolfe returned to Asheville for a visit with great trepidation.  He posed with his aging mother with whom he had a difficult, prickly relationship on the porch of her boarding house The Old Kentucky Home.

When the book became a success, Wolfe heard once again from Asheville. It turned out that people this time felt snubbed that they were left out of the new book.  And there were still whispers that Perkins was the Svengali behind the writer.

Despite their continued personal affection and friendship, this caused a professional rupture.  Wolfe abandoned Scribner’s for Harper Bros. and a new editor, Edward Aswell.

While working on a new manuscript with his autobiographical doppelganger’s name changed to George Webber, Wolfe returned to Europe, spending significant time in Germany where his work was especially admired.  But on this trip Wolfe became alarmed by the open persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime.

Unlike other writers, Wolfe had never been very political, but on his return from Europe he felt compelled to speak out.  He published a widely read and influential short story I Have a Thing to Tell You in the mildly leftist The New Republic.

In 1938 Wolfe delivered another huge, amorphous manuscript about George Webber on Aswell’s desk.  He then embarked on a western train tour that began with a lecture at Indiana University and continued on a long dreamed of tour of western National Parks and Monuments. 

My friend and fellow worker Utah Phillips quoted Wolfe’s longings in the spoken word introduction to his railroad song masterpiece Starlight on the Rails.

Oh, I will go up and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?

It was the trip of a lifetime and Wolfe was taking copious notes and writing sketches for the inclusion in a future book.  But he fell ill with a serious repertory infection and was hospitalized in Seattle.  Pneumonia filled his lungs and he did not respond to treatment. 

His worried sister Mable closed the boarding house she was running in Washington to be with him.  She brought him back across the country for treatment at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where doctors were planning emergency surgery to relieve pressure on the brain from fluid buildup.  Before slipping into a coma Wolfe dictated a last fond message to Perkins. 

The brain operation revealed significant damage to the right side of the brain from miliary tuberculosis.  On September 6, 1938 Wolfe died less than a month before his 38th birthday.  His body was returned at last to Asheville where it was laid in a family plot beside his parents and siblings.

At Harper’s Aswell carved two novels from Wolfe’s final manuscript, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again published in 1939 and ’40 respectively.  Both were critical and popular successes.

A 2000 commemorative U.S. Postage Stamp honoring Wolfe.

Aline Bernstein also had a large number of Wolfe manuscripts, mostly short stories and fragments of planned longer works that he had abandoned with her following their break-up.  Much of that material was published posthumously over the years in various forms.

Despite the high esteem in which he was held when he died, by the ‘50s his reputation was in steep decline with harsh criticism by Hemmingway characterizing him as “the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature.”  Former admirer Faulkner also became critical.  Academic writers could not neatly place him in a continuing tradition, expect acknowledging him as a pioneer of autobiographical fiction.  His elaborate style seemed passé.

Wolfe has nearly disappeared from college literature surveys and anthologies. 

But many of us will always love him.  And there are signs of a critical reassessment.  Matthew Bruccoli, best known as a Fitzgerald Scholar recreated as far as possible from surviving manuscripts the original version of O Lost, the book from which Perkins extracted Look Homeward, Angel.  Many now understand Wolfe’s original vision, and some have even come to consider the sprawling experiment greater than the familiar novel.

In 2016 Michael Grandage directed an award winning film, Genius, based on the relationship of Wolfe and Perkins.  Written by John Logan and based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, The film stared Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Wolfe, Nicole Kidman as Bernstein, Dominic West as Hemingway, and Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.  

Jude Law as Wolfe and Colin Firth as Perkins in the 2016 film Genius.

Yet the film for all of its prestigious pedigree was a critical failure and hemorrhaged red ink in both Britain and the U.S. where it was little seen outside of a handful of art houses and theaters in University towns.  A reviewer in Variety summed up the problem, “…it’s nobody’s idea of interesting to watch someone wield his red pencil over the pile of pages that would become Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.”  Too bad….

Back in Asheville, Wolfe’s childhood home, the boarding house his mother called Old Kentucky Home, is now a state owned monument and museum.  A Thomas Wolfe Society keeps his memory alive in an academic journal, with frequent conferences, and by making awards of the Wolfe Scholarship.