The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter. Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I found a musty little library with the door unlocked. There is nothing quite like the almost holy feeling of presence in an informal, well-cared-for library. When you enter, the books seem to whisper — Shhhhhh, hey, there's someone coming. I tiptoed around, inspecting the familiar Northeastern canon — the Cheevers, Roths, Eugene O’Neills, and the Updike, so much Updike. One musty black spine called out to me from the shelves, its title eroded by time — a copy of the long-out-of-print Thomas Wolfe Reader. That’s Thomas Wolfe, Southerner, born 1900, not Tom Wolfe, later-century dandy of The Hamptons. Thomas Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. As a precocious young playwright at UNC-Chapel Hill, he left the spiritually suffused but stultifying red clay of his native land to make his way in New York. By many accounts, he was an enfant terrible there, pissing people off mightily.