By Georgann Eubanks (The University of North Carolina Press, $35)
“Take to the streets that Wolfe and Fitzgerald haunted on Asheville’s urban walking tour. See the world’s largest residence, which novelist Henry James declared a “gorgeous practical joke” and novelist Edith Wharton called “a divine landscape.” Visit the Asheville bookstore that appears in a recent romance novel.
Maxwell Perkins, Thomas Wolfe’s celebrated editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, once wrote that a visit to Asheville was essential to understanding Thomas Wolfe’s writing. Perkins was quite taken with the dramatic mountains surrounding this town and the challenge of arrival by train in the early twentieth century. Today, Asheville--known as Altamont in Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel--is an easier destination. In the past two decades, the city has drawn artists, new immigrants, and retirees like a magnet. Among its 70,000-plus residents is tremendous diversity, and the city’s vital arts and literary scene continues to bloom.
A good way to get acquainted with the downtown area, the 1.7-mile Asheville Urban Trail takes about two hours on foot. Thirty stations tell the story of Asheville’s history and culture through sculptures, plaques, and monuments. (See www.justasheville.com/urban.html to print out a map of the trail in advance of your trip.)”
