Still have a soft spot for Thomas Wolfe, hence the name of the blog, so I was happy to see this quotation in a book review today:

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, in his book-length essay "From Death to Mourning," written during the early years of the Depression, wrote poignantly about how forgettable 19th-century Republican presidents — with the exception of Lincoln — were. "For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life?" Wolfe asked. "Who could believe his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides; which was which?"

A nice mix of poignant and funny and ghostly....