In this respect he was much like Walt Whitman, who had sung his own egocentric song as he shouted his "barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born 3 October 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, a resort community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall, was a native of the region; his father, William Oliver Wolfe, a tombstone cutter from Pennsylvania, had settled there a few years before he married Wolfe's mother. Tom was the youngest of the eight children born to the Wolfes. Six survived, and they and their parents would be fictionalized by Wolfe in his short life as a would-be dramatist, and later as a novelist.
In 1905 Wolfe enrolled in the Orange Street Public School in Asheville. This was his first breaking away from the family. By 1908 another kind of break occurred. For all practical purposes one could conclude that the Wolfe household then became irrevocably divided, the father living at his establishment behind his stonecutting shop, and the mother a few blocks away at her boardinghouse, My Old Kentucky Home (Dixieland in Look Homeward, Angel).
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