Years before he wrote his first book, Thomas Wolfe foretold of his discovery of something that existed in every man and realized by few. “I don’t know yet what I am capable of doing,” he wrote. “But, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it.”

Wolfe spent his childhood in a boardinghouse in Asheville in the early 1900s that his mother owned and operated. He lived there with her and a constant revolution of drifters that, in the busy months, paid for most of the beds and cots in the house. Wolfe, in later years, remembered spending every night in a different bed -- his mother would never turn a boarder away on account of needing the money. As he alludes to in The Buried Life, the Old Kentucky Home, as it was called (referred to as Dixieland in the book) was once a house in which he had been an exile. There was a stranger in that house -- “the stranger that dwelt in him and regarded him and was him, and that he did not know.”

Wolfe’s father, W.O., was a tombstone carver and a significant influence on the writer. Wolfe believed he had inherited a streak of madness from his father that found legend in stories early Asheville residents would tell among themselves of a wild drunk W.O. roaming up and down the streets at all hours of the night, cursing and striking at nothing in the air.

“Up in that back room boys, up in that back room, all among the fleas and the bugs,” W.O. would chant as his eldest son carried him home from the brothel in the early morning hours. “I pit-tee your sad doom.”

Wolfe found in his father a kindred spirit of sorts in that he inherited some of his demons in the embarrassing madness of youth.

Wolfe’s demons took the form of a ghost, a stranger that haunted him, kept him up sweating late into the night like a dying man collapsed upon the bank of the raging river of his own youth. He realized the vision of himself eventually, though he did not recognize this stranger at first. As he grew older, the stranger took the form of a book, Look Homeward, Angel or A Story of the Buried Life.

The Buried Life was Wolfe’s first novel, a largely autobiographical work.

The book is a poignant view of the lives of family and acquaintances in and around the fictional town of Altamont, a stage modeled after Asheville. Once published, the novel shocked and enraged many that knew Wolfe, and shunned him for his poignant view of family and acquaintances in and around his hometown. He was an outcast, and traveled the world for years without a home. During this time he wrote his other popular work, You Can’t Go Home Again. When Asheville fell into the throes of the Great Depression, its residents praised Wolfe and welcomed him back with open arms. Returning home after years of exile, Wolfe was embraced as the great American writer who put Asheville on the map.

When I opened the book for the first time and began to read, a door opened in silence. Wolfe’s silence -- far greater than my own -- stepped into the room like a stranded shadow, a stranger that ducked its quiet head beneath the dim light of a swaying hook lamp, smiled, and introduced itself. The stranger handed me a shovel and beckoned to me to join him outside. Together we unearthed  “something that could not be seen and could not be touched” within Wolfe, and we dug up a life that was hidden from me, buried for so long.

I spent months studying chapters of the book, rewriting passages. I began to flood notebook after notebook with writings of my own. Writing in the margins, writing upside-down, smeared words, unreadable paragraphs, mindless rants, stories of the city and the sea shattered and broken -- throw me the rain and take me home again! I could not stop. I could not suppress the insatiable hunger for a life in words -- I wanted to put it into words as Wolfe did. I wanted to give the stranger a name and a home. But, after digging up The Buried Life, I realized that there was no going back -- there was no going home again. This was an end of ends and I had been nowhere. "There is only one voyage, the first, the last, the only one,” the ghost of Thomas Wolfe’s brother whispered from the depths of the night.

“Look Homeward, Angel,” the stranger, the silence whispered to me.