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Alongside U.S. Highway 64, just west of Hendersonville, in the Oakdale Cemetery stands one of the great icons of American literature. It’s a beautifully sculpted marble angel, and she stands behind a black iron fence in the middle of the scenic graveyard. A historical marker nearby identifies her as being the inspiration for Thomas Wolfe’s monumental novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

Wolfe, who died in 1938, was a native of Asheville and the son of a stone carver who made a good living selling gravestones and monuments from his business on Pack Square in the center of town. Wolfe noted that his father’s greatest grief was his inability to sculpt the delicate features of the marble angels he admired so much, so he had to import them from Italy. One angel in particular intrigued Thomas Wolfe as a child. She stood on the porch of his father’s shop and eventually, as many believe, was purchased by the family of Mrs. Margaret Bates Johnson, who died in 1903 and was buried in the Hendersonville cemetery. And there she still stands today in all her angelic glory.

Wolfe gained fame and notoriety after the 1929 publication of his landmark novel. The highly acclaimed book was an autobiographical work about his early years in Asheville. In the book, Wolfe exposed the scandal and hypocrisy he had witnessed in the popular mountain resort town in the early days of the twentieth century. Almost overnight he became Asheville’s most despised native son, and many locals let it be known he was no longer welcome in his own hometown, which prompted the writing of his next great novel, appropriately titled, You Can’t Go Home Again. After his death, Thomas Wolfe did, indeed, come home again and is buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery. Now in an ironic twist of fate, he’s praised as a hometown hero.

In his fine book, Mountain Passages, George Ellison does extensive research on the actual location of Thomas Wolfe’s angel because there remain questions about whether the Hendersonville angel is, in fact, the angel of Wolfe’s famed work. Ellison contends that Wolfe’s angel may very well reside at the Whittier Cemetery in Bryson City, North Carolina. There she marks the grave of a young bride named Fannie Everett Clancy who died in 1904. His findings are based on detailed descriptions of the angel given by Thomas Wolfe’s mother after the death of her famous son. Ellison also describes an interview he conducted with Mrs. Fannie Leatherwood, a long-time resident of Bryson City and a friend of the Everett family. Mrs. Leatherwood, who died in 1987, told the author she remembered when Wolfe’s father brought the angel to Bryson City by train sometime around 1907 and supervised its placement in the Whittier Cemetery. The Bryson City angel, Ellison argues, more closely conforms to the description Thomas Wolfe gives in his classic novel.

So, we may never really know the actual location of the far-famed angel. There are even suggestions there are other angels matching Wolfe’s description in other western North Carolina churchyards and cemeteries. Wherever she is she stands as a silent tribute to a man who was once much taken by her beauty.