Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
This looks like an interesting collection. Here’s the review, from the Charlotte newspaper:
THE MAGICAL CAMPUS: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WRITINGS 1917-1920
By Thomas Wolfe.
Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Aldo P. Magi. University of South Carolina Press. 160 pages. $22.50.
“… the university was a charming, an unforgettable place … buried in a pastoral wilderness groved with magnificent trees … An Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in “Look Homeward, Angel.”
“The Magical Campus” collects for the first time the earliest published writing of Wolfe, the Asheville native who was once called “the most promising writer of his generation.” The collection includes poetry, plays, short fiction, essays, debate speeches and orations and news articles from his days as a student at the University of North Carolina.
It also includes his thesis, “The Crisis in Industry,” which won the Worth Prize in philosophy. The prize brought with it publication, and the thesis appeared as a pamphlet during Wolfe’s junior year. The publication qualifies as his first book. Wolfe scholar Richard Kennedy has suggested that “Crisis” shows a “glimmer of the force that was to come” and gave “a hint of the creative turbulence that was later in him.”
At Carolina, Wolfe was a star undergraduate speaker, debater and writer/editor – a wordsmith on the stage and the page. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli and Aldo P. Magi have skillfully brought this body of writing together, arranged it chronologically and written helpful head notes for each selection. The collection is enriched by illustrations, including whole pages of the yearbook Yackety Yack, front covers of magazines, Wolfe’s handwritten coversheets and notes on manuscripts.
