Aldo P. Magi Collection on Thomas Wolfe, 1900-2020 | WorldCat.org (original) (raw)

Summary:Aldo P. Magi is a white collector of all things Thomas Wolfe. His interest in Wolfe began in 1957 when he read The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. From this he read through Wolfe's fiction and the existing biographical works and began to develop the collection that would become a lifelong interest. Magi pursued his collection largely through a correspondence he maintained with librarians, scholars, and Thomas Wolfe's own friends and family. By the 1970s, Magi was an active participant in Thomas Wolfe scholarship. He was one of the founding members of the Thomas Wolfe Society and was an editor of the Thomas Wolfe Newsletter, which later became the Thomas Wolfe Review. Magi began publishing on Wolfe in 1978, producing a number of limited-edition volumes of previously unpublished Wolfe writings. He often collaborated with his close friends and fellow Wolfe scholars John S. Phillipson and Richard Walser. Magi maintained his growing collection in his house in Sandusky, Ohio, devoting even more time to it after his retirement from the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company in 1983. The collection was transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000. The Aldo P. Magi Collection on Thomas Wolfe includes a small number of original letters written by Wolfe, original photographs of Wolfe, a small number of letters written by Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins and letters written to Louise Perkins King after Maxwell Perkins's death. Also included is Magi's correspondence with people who were either associated with or interested in Wolfe. Nearly every author who wrote on Wolfe in the last decades of the 20th century is represented, as are surviving members of Wolfe's family, including the author's brother, Fred Wolfe, and nephew, R. Dietz Wolfe. Subject files contain material about Wolfe, his works, Wolfe scholars, and other topics related to Wolfe. There are also letters, drafts, and research material mostly related to articles and other publications by Magi, including "Portraits of a Novelist: Douglas Gorsline and Thomas Wolfe," "Nine Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 1924-1938," and "A Real and Lasting Affection: The Wolfe-Reynolds Correspondence"; notes, drafts, and other material related to Magi and John Phillipson's Thomas Wolfe: A Secondary Bibliography ; and correspondence, manuscripts, proofs, and other material related to Magi and Richard Walser's Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938. There are also promotional materials, programs, brochures, photographs, audiocassettes, and other material related to the annual Thomas Wolfe Festival; correspondence, scrapbooks, brochures, photographs, articles, clippings, and other information related to the Thomas Wolfe Home and Memorial in Asheville, N.C., much of which concerns the dedication and rededication of the memorial and a 1998 fire at the home and the subsequent restoration; materials relating to the Thomas Wolfe Newsletter and the Thomas Wolfe Review, both initially published by the University of Akron; promotional materials, brochures, audiocassettes, and correspondence related to annual meetings of the Thomas Wolfe Society; annual reports of the North Caroliniana Society, Inc. and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; rare book and manuscript dealer catalogs and other catalogs collected by Magi that feature items related to Wolfe; journals and other serials that relate to Wolfe; and miscellaneous materials documenting the persistent use of the phrases "look homeward, angel" and "you can't go home again," either in reference to Wolfe, or in the context of unrelated topics, such as newspapers or advertisements. There are also commercially produced and privately recorded audiocassettes, videotapes, compact dics, audiodiscs, a DVD, reel-to-reel audiotape, and film strips that include presentations and proceedings of the Thomas Wolfe Society and the Thomas Wolfe Festival, interviews, radio broadcasts, performances and readings of Wolfe's works, and books on tape. Also included are recordings of music inspired by, or otherwise related to, Wolfe or his works. Photographs chiefly relate to Thomas Wolfe Society meetings, the Thomas Wolfe Festival, and other Wolfe-related events and places, but there are also some photographs of Wolfe that were taken in 1938. Also included are index cards with descriptive and provenance information that Magi created for items in the collection