The Magical Campus: University of North Carolina Writings, 1917-1920

This is a collection of Wolfe’s earliest publications from his college years.The
Magical Campus
collects for the first time Thomas Wolfe’s earliest published works - including poems, plays, short fiction, news articles, speeches, and essays - both signed and unsigned, assembled in chronological order. The collegiate career of Wolfe began at UNC Chapel Hill in 1916, at the age of fifteen, with a freshman year marked by obscurity and loneliness. By his junior year, he had emerged as a recognized and popular figure in campus life, a central participant in numerous organizations and fraternities, and the editor of several student publications. Wolfe began in these apprenticeship years his ascendancy to iconic literary status.Included in
The Magical Campus
is Wolfe’s first published work, the poem
A Field in Flanders
from the November 1917 issue of the University of North Carolina Magazine. Here too is the poem
The Challenge,
Wolfe’s first piece to be subsequently reprinted off campus in his hometown newspaper.
A Cullenden of Virginia
marked his inaugural foray into the realm of published fiction and his folk plays, such as
The Return of Buck Gavin
and
Deferred Payment,
are illustrative of his unrealized ambitions to be a playwright. Though they lack the sophistication and scale of the grand fictions that now define Wolfe’s place in literature, his student publications speak to the potential he had tapped into.