Asheville, which prospered as a spa town, sited in the healthful air of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is home to ten colleges and even more hospitals and sushi bars. For people living within hundreds of miles it is a cultural center. The town is of course the obsessive subject of Thomas Wolfe, who was born there and is buried there. In my travels it was, or so it seemed to me, one of the happiest, most habitable and well-heeled towns I saw in the South.
