#thomas wolfe

America. It is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.

The Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, August 12, 1936.

[Edgar Lee] Masters proclaimed in his booming courthouse voice that there was no better home for a writer than the Hotel Chelsea. He urged [Thomas] Wolfe to sign the register and stood by as the younger man grasped the pen, observing with satisfaction Wolfe’s receding hairline and slightly drooping jowls. Wunderkind or not, the author of Look Homeward, Angel needed spectacles to read. But Masters meant what he’d said about the Chelsea. Granted, it lacked the polish of the Algonquin, with its fabled Round Table wits and bow-tied maître d’. The Chelsea had had a run of bad luck ... Still, for people with small bank accounts but big imaginations, a unique and intriguing spirit lingered in the atmosphere. Like a stately ocean liner, the enormous Victorian-era residence had withstood the battering of the district’s successive waves of vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons, oyster houses and seamen’s bars, office buildings and warehouse lofts. Inside the Chelsea, a tradition of tolerance, built into its bones, had allowed its occupants to weather these changes with equanimity. 

    --Sherill Tippins, Inside the Dream Palace: The Life & Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013)

Hospital de la Providencia Seattle, Washington 12 de agosto de 1938 Querido Max: Estoy haciendo esto a escondidas, contraviniendo las órdenes del médico, pero «tengo una corazonada» y quería escrib… Origen: Tengo una corazonada, Thomas Wolfe – Calle del Orco