“The Unfound Door” by Stephanie Powell Watts
“The house looks friendly and familiar, like the homeplace in a holiday reunion movie. Its wide porch holds two rows of black rockers nodding in the breeze; small plaques on the tops of the chairs list the names of the famous Carolina writers who donated them. Even without entering, you know that the floors will sag in places, many rooms will feel tacked on and haphazard like the architect made up the plan as he went along. More than once you will whiff the faintest smell of rot, but that’s part of the charm, too.”
“Too Much to Write” by Henry Rollins
“I remember reading a chunk of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River on stage in Asheville,” Henry Rollins recalled by phone recently.
No one at that bygone show, he laments, could relate. And at this, he’s utterly baffled.
“All that people seemed to know was that Thomas Wolfe was a famous writer who came from Asheville, and that his house is down the street.”
Then, the former Black Flag and Rollins Band front man turned author, publisher and stand-up philosopher takes a huge breath.
“Geeeeez,” he bellows in frustration.
“Scott Berg on His Maxwell Perkins’s Biography Adapted into Genius, starring Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe”
“Perkins had a great personal influence on the lives of these authors, who were in need not only of money and editing, but of somebody acting in loco parentis. This was true of Fitzgerald, and certainly of Wolfe, much of whose work was about men who were in search of their fathers. He found a father figure in Perkins–who had five daughters and always wanted a son. And so it made sense that he would adopt these ‘literary sons.'”