Thomas Wolfe. No need to say anything about this literary colossus who ascended to heights as majestic as the mountains that produced him.

Those who know, know. Those who don’t, well.

Anyhow, Asheville’s own has long been one of my heroes. Would that I had a speck of the talent he possessed.

But finally, I’ve managed to come up with a “connection” with Thomas Wolfe. You see, Sally, my wife, whose real name is Sarah Paul, whose mother was a Paul, says her grandfather, who was a Paul, (naturally) was Clara Paul’s cousin.

So? Well, Laura James, a girl portrayed in “Look Homeward, Angel,” with whom the book’s central character, Eugene Gant, fell in love, was in reality Clara Paul. Eugene Gant, of course, was really a fictional name for Thomas Wolfe himself.

Clara actually spent a summer in Asheville, in the Wolfe home. She was a young schoolteacher who had come all the way from the hot, muggy coastal plains to enjoy the cool mountain summer. Young Tom became infatuated with the pretty schoolteacher from down east. Fred Wolfe, now 80, says his brother had a case of “puppy love,” and when she left at the end of the summer he was “crushed.”

So … Clara Paul wound up in “Love Homeward, Angel,” Thomas Wolfe went on to become a great man of letters and almost a half century later I married Sarah Paul Cox, whose mother was a Paul, and whose grandfather was a Paul (naturally) who was a cousin of … (I’ve already been through that, haven’t I?)

When I was living in the Asheville area, on occasion I would visit Riverside Cemetery, just to commune a bit with Thomas Wolfe, who is buried in a family plot not too far away from O. Henry’s final resting place. (Two of America’s greatest writers interred but a few paces from each other — a story in itself.)

Had the young Tom Wolfe been able to woo and win the hand of “cousin” Clara Paul … well, now, that would really have been something.

APROPOS — “ Within every big story there’s usually one or more little stories …”

— Kenneth Pointer

Note — This column first appeared in papers across the state in March of 1976.