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Often acknowledging Thomas Wolfe's inspiration for his own writing life, Robert Morgan does his part to advance the legacy of the famous writer born thirty miles from Morgan's North Carolina home near Zirconia, close to Hendersonville and Flat Rock. When asked why North Carolina boasts so many writers, Morgan answers, first, "Thomas Wolfe," for his success enabled others to see writing as a possibility ("O Lost" 6). In numerous public addresses, Morgan has reiterated the influence Wolfe had on his life and writing. Speaking to Thomas Wolfe Society members in 2000, Wolfe's centennial year, he shared the story of finding Look Homeward, Angel on the shelves of Henderson County's bookmobile when he was fifteen. Morgan also told that story in Colorado the previous year as part of his keynote address for the "Hemingway and War" Conference at the United States Air Force Academy. There, he called Wolfe's novel the "greatest discovery" he made the year before going to college ("Hemingway" 138), and he underscored that discovery in his 2008 Thomas Wolfe Lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His 2013 Thomas Wolfe Society address explored Wolfe's American West travel journal as well as his writing about the Blue Ridge Mountains, whose landscape and people are central to Morgan's own literary production.1
Morgan also has composed three poems about Wolfe, two as commemorations: "Legends" for Wolfe's centennial and "Ancient Talk of Mountains" for the 2013 meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Society in Boise, Idaho.2 His previous poem about Wolfe, "Looking Homeward," which appears in At the Edge of the Orchard Country (1987), is divided between (an unnamed) Wolfe and a Blue Ridge moonshiner. The poem offers diverse visions of home embodying the contradictions that nurture most art - ists' work, including Morgan's. His portrait of Wolfe shows the writer in his Brooklyn apartment kitchen:
A giant in undershirt
and suspenders bends his tiny head
under the lamp and scrawls
enormous script, brushing the pages
to the already cluttered floor,
and pausing just long enough to number
the next, continues the rush of the sentence.
He rubs
out a cigarette and, cursing the pen,
fills it from a jar and starts again,
lusting to sweep out across the virgin space
like an explorer leaving...