About The Gray Jacket
The Gray Jacket was the first literary magazine of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (known today as Virginia Tech). Published intermittently from 1875–1909 by the Lee Literary Society and the Maury Literary Society, The Gray Jacket featured short fiction, poetry, essays, letters to the editor, and humorous anecdotes, written primarily by students at the College.
Today, Virginia Tech's Special Collections holds approximately 50 original issues of The Gray Jacket. (Many more issues are missing from the collection.) During spring semester of 2014, the graduate students in Quinn Warnick's Introduction to Digital Humanities course began digitizing the first issues of the magazine and republishing them here, as if The Gray Jacket were a contemporary online literary journal.
This endeavor is just getting started, but we hope this glimpse into Virginia Tech's literary history will spark new conversations about the evolution of creative writing programs and publications at American universities. We have a lot of work still to do, so if you would like to get involved in the project, please let us know!