Jacobi attended the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1930, majoring in English Literature, where he began his writing career in campus magazines and was an undergraduate classmate of Donald Wandrei. He wrote of this period on Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1939) that "I tried to divide my time between rhetoric courses and the geology lab. As an underclassman I was somewhat undecided whether future life would find me studying rocks and fossils or simply pounding a typewriter. The typewriter won." Jacobi's first stories were published while he was at the University. Long before graduation he made his first professional sale, a short detective tale, "Rumbling Cannon", to "Secret Service Stories." This ought to have paid around fifty dollars but Jacobi received nothing since the pulp folded soon after the story was published. The last of the stories he published while at university, "Moss Island", was a graduate's contribution to "The Quest" of Central High School, and "Mive" (which won a college-wide contest judged by Margaret Culkin Banning), published in the University of Minnesota's "The Minnesota Quarterly". Both stories were later sold to "Amazing Stories" (Winter 1932) and "Weird Tales" respectively and marked his debut in professional magazines. "Mive" ("Weird Tales", 1932) brought him payment of 25 dollars. "Mive" was praised by H. P. Lovecraft in his letter to Jacobi of 27 February 1932: "Mive please me immensely, and I told Wright that I was glad to see at least one story whose weirdness of incident was made convincing by adequate emotional preparation and suitably developed atmosphere." Lovecraft commended Jacobi's work to Derleth and thereby helped set up the long-term relationship Arkham House would have with Jacobi.