Introduction
1. Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 60.
2. Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 251–259.
3. Paul L. Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 286.
4. Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
5. Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 164, 168, 185.
6. Dana, 226.
7. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 97–98.
8. Rosemary M. Magee, ed., Conversations with Flannery O’Connor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 43.
9. Dana, 16.
10. Quoted in Zlatko Anguelov, “Tennessee Williams,” The Writing University (10 January 2012), web.
11. Earl G. Ingersoll, ed., Conversations with Rita Dove (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 17.
12. Dinger, 123–124.
13. Olsen and Schaeffer, 259; Dana, 51.
14. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 173.
15. Papers of Paul Engle, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Hereafter, PPE SCUI.
16. Paul Engle, ed., Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (New York: Random House, 1961), 1.
17. Dana, ix.
18. Engle, 2.
19. Dana, 38.
20. Dana, 39.
21. Engle, 4.
22. Stephen Wilbers, “Paul Engle: An Imaginative and Delicate Aggression,” Iowa Alumni Review 30 (1977): 8–13.
23. Dana, 39.
24. Dana, 46.
25. Dana, 29.
26. Edward J. Delaney, “Where Great Writers Are Made,” Atlantic Monthly, 16 July 2007, web.
27. Delaney, 1.
28. D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 146. Records of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Hereafter, RIWW SCUI.
29. Myers, 165.
30. RIWW SCUI.
31. Edmund Skellings to Stephen Wilbers, 10 May 1976, RIWW SCUI.
32. Crumley, whose The Last Good Kiss (1978) is regarded as one of the most influential crime novels of the late twentieth century, earned his MFA from the Workshop in 1966, just one year before founding the creative writing program at Colorado State University.
33. A sampling of the raw data from the 1976 survey conducted by Stephen Wilbers illustrates the widespread influence of Iowa graduates and faculty on the development of creative writing programs. Thomas Rabbitt (MFA, Iowa, 1972) founded the MFA program at the University of Alabama, which was officially approved in November 1973. Rabbitt was the director with five faculty members, a total of twenty degree candidates, and four degrees awarded annually. William Harrison and James Whitehead, both Iowa MFAs, were the key figures in the founding of the program at the University of Arkansas in 1964. Philip O’Connor, Iowa MFA, helped establish the program at Bowling Green State University in 1968. Mark Strand, Iowa MFA, was a co-founder of the Brooklyn College program, established in 1974. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was saturated with Iowa MFAs, including Joseph Langland, Andrew Fetler, Richard Kim, and Robert Tucker, who made up half of its faculty in 1976. The University of Northern Iowa program (established 1961) was run by Loren Taylor, 1951 Iowa MFA, whose professional standards learned at the Workshop seemed to eclipse bureaucratic dysfunction. “I have had 3 students who have published in the last three years (two novels and poetry), but the result has not been because of any concentrated program of our department,” he admitted. The effort, according to the Iowa model, was to professionalize, although there was not always a direct correlation between institutional cohesion and student publication toward professional careers. RIWW SCUI.
34. Myers, 146.
35. RIWW SCUI.
36. James L. West, III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
37. Ben Harris McClary, “Washington Irving’s Literary Pimpery,” American Notes and Queries 10 (1972): 150–151. The pejorative diction of the title arises from McClary’s discovery of Irving’s proposal to aid a friend’s career by attempting to place a manuscript, as if it were his friend’s, with a publisher given to him several years earlier by a Boston businessman. It is “quite good,” he assured his friend, and would go far to launch his career. Before the findings in this research, McClary was not so damning about the ethics of Irving’s business dealings, tracing his promotion of several authors through archival letters in an earlier study titled “Washington Irving’s Literary Midwifery: Five Unpublished Letters from the British Repository,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 277–283. McClary’s finding, though provocative, is not typical of Irving’s business practice that, however aggressive, was not so grossly unethical.
38. Stephen King, “Acceptance Speech: National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” The National Book Foundation (20 November 2003), web.
39. Tom Kealey, The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: A Guide for Prospective Graduate Students (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 22.
40. RIWW SCUI.
41. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
42. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 196.
43. RIWW SCUI.
44. Myers, 61.
45. Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1973]).
46. William Wallace Whitelock, The Literary Guillotine (New York: John Lane, 1903), 252.
47. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Authors in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 144.
48. Engle’s income for his books Poet’s Choice and On Creative Writing was $1,593.09 from E.P. Dutton and Company for a five-month period ending in April 1965. An Old Fashioned Christmas garnered steady royalty checks, yet scant earnings for Poems in Praise are on record, with many checks like one for American Child from Dial Press dated June 30, 1959, worth as little as $11.09. Engle sold 29,268 Valentine cards for Hallmark Inc. in February 1967 (receipt dated March 31, 1967), securing a tidy $7,317 for his efforts; Hallmark had established a lucrative relationship with him several years earlier, with a steady stream of checks coming during the 1960s for more than $500. Christmas cards were his cash cow, as seen by his first Hallmark payday of $184.50 on January 20, 1961. Engle’s creative writing fed greeting card and television industries. The Golden Child aired on television, was published in Guideposts (a white middle-class Protestant general interest magazine), and was rehashed into a greeting card by that journal. A letter dated October 14, 1960, from Glenn D. Kittler of Guideposts indicates a business relationship with Engle. Engle also dabbled in popular sports poetry, netting a substantial $2,000 advance for a poem on the Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated, as revealed in a letter from Percy Knauth dated April 23, 1961. Though considerable time and effort went into them, none of these publications are mentioned in Wilbers or Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972). It is also worth noting that his Random House receipts are minuscule compared with those of his mass market productions. Poems in Praise, for example, earned him $20.16 in royalties on August 4, 1961 (as indicated in a letter from Jane Wilson of William Morris and Company, his agent). PPE SCUI.
49. Paul Engle to Sinclair Lewis, 27 February 1951, PPE SCUI.
50. Paul Engle, Response to draft chapter, “Engle Workshop,” PPE SCUI.
51. Shirley Lim, “The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional History,” Pedagogy 3.2 (2003), 157.
52. Quoted in Ron McFarland, “An Apologia for Creative Writing,” College English 55 (1993), 28.
53. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (St. Paul, Minn.: Gray Wolf, 1992), 2.
54. For a skeptical approach toward the enterprise, see Dana Goodyear, “The Moneyed Muse,” New Yorker, 19 February 2007, web.
55. Gioia, 13.
56. Edmund Skellings to Stephen Wilbers, 10 May 1976, RIWW SCUI.
57. All quotations in the paragraph are from Kiyohiro Miura, “ ‘I’ll Make Your Career,’ ” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 57, 59.
58. Dinger, 15.
59. Ellison’s point here has been underscored by recent theorists commenting on literature deliberately written for the masses, such as the serial fiction of the New York Ledger. Michael Denning’s suggestion that “questions about the sincerity of [popular literature’s] purported beliefs or the adequacy of their political proposals are less interesting than questions about the narrative embodiment of their political ideologies,” a point which, I would argue, equally applies to self-conscious attempts at serious literature for the elite market. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 103.
60. PPE SCUI.
61. Loren Glass, “Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” The Minnesota Review (Winter/Spring 2009), 2.
62. Lynn Neary, “In Elite MFA Programs, the Challenge of Writing While ‘Other,’ ” National Public Radio, 19 August 2014, web.
63. Junot Díaz, “MFA vs. POC,” New Yorker, 30 April 2014, 32.
64. Robert Sullivan, 2 February 1976, transcribed from audio cassette, RIWW SCUI.
65. Myers, 150.
66. Myers, 148–149.
67. Myers, 149.
68. Myers, 116.
69. Mearns’s Dewey-influenced goal for writing instruction was “always of self-expression as a means of personal growth” to permeate every aspect of the student’s life over and against mastering written expression in fiction, poetry, and drama. “The business of making professional poets” he disavowed entirely as “another matter—with which this writer has never had the least interest.” Hughes Mearns, Creative Power (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), 119–120.
70. Olsen and Schaeffer, 271. “The professional success rates for graduates in creative writing [based on the success rate for publication] is about one percent (compared with 90 percent for graduates of medical school),” according to Myers, 2.
71. Olsen and Schaeffer, 217–218.
72. Further signs of the difficulty of gaining entrance into the Workshop, even for a non-degree earning observer of a single class, appear in Frank Conroy’s rejection of University of Iowa public relations representative Winston Barclay’s offer “to sit in on one of the workshops for a semester” as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of the program to enhance future publicity. Winston Barclay to Frank Conroy, 26 February 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Directors of other programs would have welcomed such an opportunity for free publicity. Conroy instead demurred, citing high standards for admission, emphasizing that the “people who didn’t make the cut include a medical doctor, numerous PhD’s, Magnas and Summas from the best universities in the country, widely published fiction writers, people with very strong recommendations from current and past visiting staff, etc.,” despite Barclay’s desire to observe in a temporary capacity rather than formally apply. After regaling him with such daunting odds for admission, Conroy suggested to Barclay, “you can of course apply,” an arch dismissal carrying considerable cruelty, especially since plenty of classroom space was available. The type of promotion Conroy did pursue was not free, as seen in his negotiations with private fund-raisers such as the Endowment Planning Group, who sent him an elaborate proposal for a campaign titled “The Plan,” a fifteen-page document sent via fax in 1990. In a letter to Michael Rea of the Dungannon Foundation, Conroy openly worried about accepting the offer because he was uncertain that the budget could withstand the high fees the private fund-raising consultant demanded. Roberta d’Estachio to Frank Conroy, 19 December 1990; Frank Conroy to Michael Rea, 14 December 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
73. Olsen and Schaeffer, 61–62.
74. Olsen and Schaeffer, 60.
75. Paul Engle, ed., On Creative Writing (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964), vii.
1. The Brilliant Misfit: Flannery O’Connor
1. Jean W. Cash, Flannery O’Connor: A Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 93.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters Edited and With an Introduction, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 176.
3. Hajime Noguchi, Criticism of Flannery O’Connor (Tokyo: Bunkashobouhakubunsha, 1985), 60–61.
4. Colman McCarthy, “The Servant of Literature in the Heart of Iowa: Paul Engle,” Washington Post, 27 March 1983.
5. Cash, 81.
6. Jean Wylder, “Flannery O’Connor: A Reminiscence and Some Letters,” North American Review 255.1 (Spring 1970), 60.
7. Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 120.
8. Cash, 81.
9. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 6 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
10. Gooch, 152.
11. Richard Gilman, “On Flannery O’Connor,” New York Review of Books, 21 August 1969, 25.
12. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 6 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
13. McCarthy.
14. Bob Fawcell, “William Porter’s Writing Center: From Pulp to Post,” Daily Iowan, 26 January 1946.
15. Barbara Spargo to Stephen Wilbers, 2 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
16. Wylder, 58. Tom Grimes notes that the GI Education Bill “accounted for the high percentage of men participating in the Workshop’s early years,” which placed O’Connor in a tiny minority of “one of only three women in the Workshop in the late 1940s”; The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 36.
17. Barbara Spargo to Stephen Wilbers, 2 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
18. Current Biography Yearbook: Who’s News and Why, 1942 (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942), 249.
19. Grimes, 35.
20. Gooch, 122.
21. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 127.
22. O’Connor, Mystery, 127.
23. Cash, 39.
24. Flannery O’Connor, Conversations, ed. Rosemary Magee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 99.
25. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 192.
26. Gooch, 123.
27. Hank Messick to Stephen Wilbers, 26 March 1976, RIWW SCUI.
28. Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, 26 December 1947, 9E.
29. Wylder, 58.
30. Cash, 92.
31. Wylder, 58.
32. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 422.
33. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 74.
34. Paul Engle to Virgil Hancher, 31 October 1963, PPE SCUI.
35. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), xiii.
36. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 23–24.
37. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 35.
38. Ben Ray Redman, Review of Break the Heart’s Anger by Paul Engle, New York Herald Tribune Books, 22 March 1936.
39. PPE SCUI.
40. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 27.
41. In his vision, literature became a mechanism for what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture, which in Engle’s case marked the beginning of the current movement of literary culture into popular culture. The Workshop epitomizes an early embodiment of convergence culture, especially in the leveraging of diverse media merging at the intersection of technologies, industries, cultures, and audiences. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 14.
42. Engle’s process echoes what Jim Collins describes as the way “literary reading now comes with its own self-legitimating mythology that sanctifies the singularity of reading novels as an aesthetic experience, the way they used to be read, yet these same novels became global bestsellers only through the intervention of popular literary culture.” Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 225.
43. Cash, 81.
44. Gooch, 125–126.
45. Cash, 82.
46. Paul Engle, “Introduction” to Midland, manuscript draft, PPE SCUI.
47. See for example Mark McGurl’s claim that Engle’s sadism was a perfect match for O’Connor’s masochism in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). He argues that O’Connor was obsessed with “the necessary pleasures of the ‘discipline’ ” of writing, especially “the discipline of narrative form . . . as a masochistic aesthetics of institutionalization,” making “discipline itself a kind of religion” whereby institutions are reinforced by obedience to rules. Submitting to the authority of institutions such as Engle’s Workshop and the Catholic Church, he claims, provided O’Connor with “a source of great pleasure, aesthetic or otherwise.” McGurl, 135. The point is well taken, although it elides the very real stand O’Connor took against not only Engle’s editorial feedback, but also that of the editor he arranged to publish her first novel, Wise Blood. Further, her willingness to satirize her mentor’s zeal to market and advertise the program through business sponsorship also undermines this flat depiction of her as passively submitting to his will. The reality of their relationship was far more complex.
48. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
49. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
50. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
51. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
52. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 13.
53. Cash, 128.
54. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 14.
55. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1946), ix.
56. O’Connor, Complete Stories, xi.
57. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 14.
58. Margaret Meaders, “Flannery O’Connor: Literary Witch,” Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1962), 384.
59. Gooch, 136–137.
60. Robie Macauley to Stephen Wilbers, 16 April 1976, RIWW SCUI.
61. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 45.
62. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 14 February 1955, PPE SCUI.
63. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 3 April 1960, PPE SCUI.
64. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 7 June 1961, PPE SCUI.
65. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949), 27.
66. O’Connor, Complete Stories, 132.
67. O’Connor, Wise Blood, 14.
68. O’Connor, Wise Blood, 15.
69. Wylder, 59.
2. The Star: W. D. Snodgrass
1. Donald J. Torchiana, “Heart’s Needle: Snodgrass Strides Through the Universe,” Northwestern Tri-Quarterly (Spring 1960), 18, RIWW SCUI.
2. Robert Bly, “When Literary Life Was Still Piled Up in a Few Places,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 39.
3. Peter Nelson quoted in Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 53.
4. Robert Dana, “De,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 293.
5. W. D. Snodgrass, After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1999), 9.
6. J. D. McClatchy, “W. D. Snodgrass: The Mild, Reflective Art,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 118.
7. Dana, “De,” 296.
8. Donald Hall, “Seasoned Wood,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 285, 288.
9. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 130; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Signet, 1991), 217.
10. Paul Engle, “The Writer and the Place,” in Midland (New York: Random House, 1961), xxv.
11. Suzanne McConnell quoted in Seems Like Old Times, ed. Ed Dinger (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 35.
12. R. W. Apple, “The Shaping of Writers on Campus” [reprint], Des Moines Register, 24 May 1963, 10.
13. Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, 26 December 1947, 9G.
14. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 39.
15. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 724.
16. Jean Wylder, “Flannery O’Connor,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 234.
17. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 119–120.
18. Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Origins, Emergence, and Growth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 94.
19. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 125.
20. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 125.
21. Robert Boyers and W. D. Snodgrass, “W. D. Snodgrass: An Interview,” Salmagundi 22–23 (Spring–Summer 1973): 165.
22. Boyers and Snodgrass, 165.
23. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 131.
24. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder [n.d.], Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
25. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 129.
26. William Stafford to Jean Wylder, 8 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
27. McClatchy, 117–118.
28. McClatchy, 114.
29. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 133.
30. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
31. W. D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle (New York: Knopf, 1959), 52, 54, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
32. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 47; Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle [dust jacket], Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
33. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 47, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
34. Snodgrass, After-Images, 194.
35. Richard Stern to Jean Wylder, 10 May 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
36. Morgan Gibson to Jean Wylder, 4 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
37. Snodgrass, After-Images, 194.
38. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle [dust jacket], Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
39. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 36–37, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
40. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 34–35, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
41. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 53, Iowa Writers Series, SCUI; Torchiana, “Snodgrass Strides Through the Universe,” 18.
42. Ed Blaine to Stephen Wilbers, 14 June 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.
43. Ogden Plumb to Jean Wylder, 27 April 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
44. Lewis Turco, “The Iowa Workshop: An Assenting View,” Prairie Schooner (Spring 1965), 93–94, RIWW SCUI.
45. Marvin Bell, “He Made It Possible,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 74.
46. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 123.
47. William Stafford to Jean Wylder, 8 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
48. James Sunwall to Jean Wylder, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
49. Dana, “De,” 293.
50. Dana, “De,” 292.
51. McClatchy, 118.
52. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 62.
53. Philip L. Gerber and Robert J. Gemmett, eds., “ ‘No Voices Talk to Me’: A Conversation with W. D. Snodgrass,” Western Humanities Review 24.1 (Winter 1970), 71.
54. W. D. Snodgrass to Paul Engle, 30 December 1964; 11 January 1964; 21 June 1964; PPE SCUI.
55. John Gilgun to Jean Wylder, 2 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
3. The Suicide: Robert Shelley
1. T. George Harris, “University of Iowa’s Paul Engle: Poet-Grower of the World,” Look, 1 June 1965, PPE SCUI.
2. Warren Carrier, “Some Recollections,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 23.
3. J. D. McClatchy, “W. D. Snodgrass: The Mild, Reflective Art,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 114.
4. McClatchy, 114. See also Paul L. Gaston, W. D. Snodgrass (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 59.
5. Carrier, 23.
6. Vance Bourjaily describes how “one of [Kim’s] manuscripts dealt in some way with suicide, and I may have said something about thinking suicide was too easy a solution for the problem in the story. It was at this point that Richard rose, looked to us for recognition, and on receiving it, said: ‘We have a rather different attitude towards suicide in my culture.’ He went on to describe people who thought of suicide as honorable, courageous, and ritually necessary in certain situations.” Vance Bourjaily, “Dear Hualing,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 54.
7. Ray B. West, “COMMENT: The Boys in the Basement,” Western Review 13.1 (Autumn 1948), 2.
8. Robert Shelley, “Le Lac des Cygnes,” Western Review 13.1 (Autumn 1948), 34.
9. Student Applications, Robert Shelley, 1949, RIWW SCUI.
10. Robin Hemley, “A Critique of Postgraduate Workshops and a Case for Low-Residency MFAs,” Teaching Creative Writing, ed. Heather Beck (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 104.
11. Harris, “University of Iowa’s Paul Engle.”
12. Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, 26 December 1947, 9E.
13. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop.”
14. Nancy C. Andreasen, “Creativity and Mental Illness,” American Journal of Psychiatry 144.10 (1987): 1288–1292. Herbert Hendin, Suicide in America: A New and Expanded Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 30. Also citing Andreasen’s seminal 1987 study of mental illness at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is scientific research by Frederick K. Godwin and Kay Redfield Jamison in Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which concludes that a “predisposition to creativity” is significantly linked to suicides (394). Corroborating Andreasen’s findings are those of Kay Jamison, whose “study of 47 British artists and writers found that 38 percent had sought treatment for mood disorders, compared to fewer than two percent in the general population.” Significantly, “Half the poets in the group” sought treatment; Eric Maisel, Creativity for Life: Practical Advice on the Artist’s Personality and Career from America’s Foremost Creativity Coach (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2007), 47. The connection has been considered almost common knowledge among producers and insiders of creative media industries, as seen in Jimi Hendrix’s autobiographical lyric lamenting that “Manic depression is a frustrating mess,” and the more than five hundred paintings with unambiguous suicidal imagery, including Andy Warhol’s Suicide, Edvard Munch’s The Suicide, and Jackson Pollock’s Ten Ways of Killing Myself. Former Workshop director Frank Conroy suffered a “nervous breakdown” that struck “as I finished my autobiography,” Stop-Time. With no pharmaceutical or talking cure, he, like Shelley, was forced “out of shame and great effort, to hide the inner turmoil, put on a mask of normalcy and soldier through one day at a time”; Tom Grimes, Mentor (Portland, Ore.: Tin House, 2010), 223. For more on psychiatric issues among Workshop members, see chapter 7, “Mad Poets: Dylan Thomas and John Berryman.”
15. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop.”
16. E. A. Robinson, The Poetry of E. A. Robinson, ed. Robert Mezey (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 8.
17. Lorrie Goldensohn aptly warns, “any reader of Randall Jarrell ought to be careful not to make simplistic arguments about repressed homosexuality. It is as if Jarrell retreated to being a woman, or being maternal at any rate, not so much because he really wanted to be a woman, or give up any powerful prerogatives assigned to the male gender.” Jarrell did not want to cancel male identity “but to enlarge it” by “appropriating feminine character” and “poaching on emotions normally thought to belong to women alone.” In this way he evaded falling into the “predictable binaries” that he believed restrained the creative process. Lorrie Goldensohn, Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 213. Virginia Woolf similarly fueled her best writing, such as Orlando, by transcending the limitations of gender.
18. Richard Bode, Beachcombing at Miramar: The Quest for an Authentic Life (New York: Warner, 1996), 167. Others raising repressed homosexuality as the cause of the character Richard Cory’s suicide include Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s most recent biographer, who writes, “We are apt to look at a life as dependent upon male friendship as Robinson’s and wonder if he did not live out his days as a closeted gay man (closeted against himself most of all)”; Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), e-book.
19. James Sunwall, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
20. Harris, “University of Iowa’s Paul Engle.”
21. James B. Hall, “Our Workshops Remembered: The Heroic Phase” [n.d.], RIWW SCUI.
22. Quoted in Loren Glass, “Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” Minnesota Review 71–72 (Winter/Spring 2009), 4.
23. William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 104.
24. Philip McGowan, Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), x.
25. Brewster Ghiselin, “Poets Learning,” Poetry 79.5 (February 1952), 289.
26. Paul Engle, “Poet and Professor Overture,” Poetry 79.5 (February 1952), 270.
27. Ghiselin, “Poets Learning,” 289.
28. McClatchy, 115.
29. “Student Kills Self with Hunting Rifle,” Daily Iowan, 26 April 1951: 1.
30. Robert Shelley, “Harvest,” in Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, ed. Paul Engle (New York: Random House, 1961), 538.
31. Carrier, 23.
32. James Sunwall, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
33. Shelley, “Harvest,” 538.
34. Shelley, “Harvest,” 538.
35. “Student Kills Self with Hunting Rifle,” 1.
36. Quoted in Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 274.
37. Robert Shelley, “On My Twenty-First Birthday,” in Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, ed. Paul Engle (New York: Random House, 1961), 539.
38. Quoted in Brunner, Cold War Poetry, 274.
39. “Go Way, Ya Bother Me!” Daily Iowan, 26 April 1951: 1.
40. Shelley, “Harvest,” 538–539.
41. W. D. Snodgrass, “An Interview with Elizabeth Spires,” American Poetry Review 15 (July–August 1990): 38–46.
42. Hall, “Our Workshops Remembered.”
43. Engle, “Poet and Professor Overture,” 268.
44. Donald Petersen, “The Stages of Narcissus,” Poetry 83.3 (December 1953), 141–144.
45. Andreasen, 1288.
46. James Sunwall, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
47. Wylder-Leggett Addendum to James Sunwall, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
48. Richard Stern, 26 April 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
49. Richard Stern, 26 April 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
4. The Professional: R. V. Cassill
1. Jean Wylder, “R. V. Cassill,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 194–195.
2. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 36.
3. Edmund Skellings to Paul Engle, 17 May 1963, PPE SCUI.
4. Paul Engle, ed., Midland (New York: Random House, 1961), 583–584.
5. R. V. Cassill, The Eagle on the Coin (New York: Random House, 1950), 208–209.
6. R. V. Cassill, Dormitory Women (New York: Lion, 1954), 3.
7. Evan Thomas (Harper and Brothers Director, General Books Department) to Paul Engle, 10 March 1960, PPE SCUI.
8. Evan Thomas to Paul Engle, 10 March 1960, PPE SCUI.
9. William Oman to Paul Engle, 11 March 1960, PPE SCUI.
10. R. T. Bond to Paul Engle, 5 May 1960, PPE SCUI.
11. R. T. Bond to Paul Engle, 5 May 1960, PPE SCUI.
12. Paul Engle to John Gerber, 7 January 1963, PPE SCUI.
13. Paul Engle to Gordon G. Dupee, 26 November 1962, PPE SCUI.
14. Peter H. Huyck, “Cassill’s Latest Book—A Treatment of the Mechanics,” Daily Iowan, 19 March 1963.
15. Huyck, “Cassill’s Latest Book.”
16. Huyck, “Cassill’s Latest Book.”
17. Huyck, “Cassill’s Latest Book.”
18. Don Justice to Paul Engle, 4 April 1963, PPE SCUI.
19. David Roberts, Letter to the Editor, Daily Iowan, 22 March 1963.
20. Norman Peterson, Letter to the Editor, Daily Iowan, 23 March 1963.
21. Laird Addis, Jr., et al., Letter to the Editor, Daily Iowan, 26 March 1963.
22. Don Justice to Paul Engle, 4 April 1963, PPE SCUI.
23. Edmund Skellings to Paul Engle, 17 May 1963, PPE SCUI.
24. Don Justice to Paul Engle, 4 April 1963, PPE SCUI.
25. Edmund Skellings to Paul Engle, 17 May 1963, PPE SCUI.
26. Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Origins, Emergence, and Growth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 96–97.
27. Edmund Skellings to Paul Engle, 17 May 1963, PPE SCUI.
28. R. V. Cassill to Paul Engle, 23 April 1963, PPE SCUI.
29. Gordon Dupee to Paul Engle, 26 July 1963, PPE SCUI.
30. Just as Cassill had dabbled in the market for erotic novels, Engle himself explored the seamy side of popular print culture. In 1962, for example, he ordered The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, only to discover that the United States Postal Service had refused delivery and impounded it. The publisher notified him that “Our attorneys are preparing a vigorous campaign to overcome this latest instance of Post Office censorship.” To Paul Engle from Documentary Books, 31 December 1962, PPE SCUI.
31. One advertisement makes a particularly overt gesture at arguing that the man of letters is also a man of business by presenting facsimiles of two signed typewritten letters designed to look like evidence laid on a table. The letter taking up the left half of the advertisement on Cleveland’s Western Reserve University letterhead certifies Engle’s acumen as a speaker “both in the academic and the popular sense of setting up the criteria for judging American literature and following it through with appropriate and stimulating examples,” a line underscored for emphasis. Next to it is a reference from Rochester Ad Club, Inc., a New York association of advertisers, lauding Engle’s talk as “one of the most unique programs in the history of the Rochester Ad Club.” In cursive above his name appears the heading, “To listen to him is an experience which should be enjoyed by more.” W. Colston Leigh, Inc., Advertisement for Paul Engle, 1951, PPE SCUI.
32. R. V. Cassill to Paul Engle, n.d., 1962, PPE SCUI.
33. R. V. Cassill, “Why I Left the Midwest,” in In an Iron Time: Statements and Reiterations, Essays by R. V. Cassill (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1969), 131.
34. Wilbers, 114.
35. Verlin Cassill to Stephen Wilbers, 26 August 1976, RIWW SCUI.
36. See the epilogue for more details and further discussion of how Engle’s relationship with Gerber precipitated his resignation from the Workshop.
37. Cassill, “Why I Left the Midwest,” 130.
38. “Biographical Note,” R. Verlin Cassill Manuscripts, SCUI. See also Philip Roth’s look back in anger at Iowa for comparison to Cassill’s. After Roth’s brief stint as a faculty member, he fulminated against the campus and the town in the pages of Esquire so violently that its editors wrote President Virgil M. Hancher asking for a reply. He declined, explaining to Engle that “if I started a reply, I might say more than would be wise under the circumstances.” Virgil Hancher to Paul Engle, 21 November 1962, PPE SCUI. Roth’s piece, “Iowa: A Very Far Country Indeed,” appeared in the December 1962 issue of Esquire.
39. Cassill, “Why I Left the Midwest,” 131.
40. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 160–171.
41. R. V. Cassill, “The Killer Inside Me: Fear, Purgation, and the Sophoclean Light,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 233.
42. Louis Menand, “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?” New Yorker, 8 June 2009, web.
43. Verlin Cassill, “Associated Writing Programs,” ADE [American Departments of English] Bulletin 17 (May 1968): 33–35.
44. Robert Day, “The Early Days of AWP,” Association of Writers and Writers Programs, 11 September 2012, web.
45. R. V. Cassill, “Introduction,” in Fifteen by Three, ed. James Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1957), 7.
46. Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972), 204–205.
47. R. V. Cassill, “And In My Heart,” Collected Stories (University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 144. Among the many stories based on Cassill’s experience teaching creative writing are “The Romanticizing of Dr. Fless,” and “The Martyr.” The former articulates the persistent theme in Cassill’s stories of the struggle to write great literature in mass culture. Protagonist Dick Samson considers the case of Hart Crane’s suicide and asks rhetorically, “what the hell good does it do you to write that well if nobody wants it? You may write the best poetry in the world, but the damned pigs force you to write prose to make a living.” Cassill, “The Romaniticizing of Dr. Fless,” Collected Stories, 555. “The Martyr” reprises another dominant theme in Cassill’s work of romantic affairs in college settings, as his main character Professor Alleman in his mid-forties “was having an affair with a student named Lois.” While lying in bed with her after a tryst, he inadvertently bursts into tears recalling “a pretty and rambunctious nun” he had as a student, a figure loosely based on Flannery O’Connor. Alleman inadvertently reveals he really loved the idealistic nun who “told him nothing was worth aiming for except sainthood,” prompting the jealousy of Lois in an echo of Gretta Conroy, Gabriel’s wife, in James Joyce’s The Dead. Cassill, “The Martyr,” Collected Stories, 570, 567. Cassill registered the significance of Gretta’s revelation of her love for Michael Fury in his introduction to his first collection of stories, noting that how “Gabriel finds his wife’s love at the instant of revelation when he learns it is irretrievably fixed to the memory of the dead boy” is significantly linked to how “sometimes writers must hope no more of love from readers than that they may say, like Gabriel’s wife, ‘I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.’ ” Cassill, “Introduction,” 5.
48. Bernard Bergzorn, New York Times Book Review, 22 April 1965, 16.
49. James Laughlin, ed., Fifteen by Three (New York: New Directions, 1957), v.
50. Laughlin, Fifteen by Three, vi; Grimes, 35–36.
51. Cassill, “Why I Left the Midwest,” 121.
52. Cassill, “And In My Heart,” 145.
5. The Guru: Marguerite Young
1. Bruce Kellner, “Miss Young, My Darling,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 20.2 (Summer 2000), 150.
2. Kellner, 160.
3. William Cotter Murray, “Marguerite Young: Trying on a Style,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 201.
4. Kellner, 160.
5. Murray, 205.
6. Murray, 204.
7. Murray, 202–203.
8. Murray, 204.
9. Barry Silesky, John Gardner: Literary Outlaw (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 2004), 62–63.
10. Murray, 203.
11. Kellner, 150.
12. Molly McQuade, “Famous Writers’ School: Novelists and Poets Remember Their Student Days at the University of Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, 4 June 1995, 2, web.
13. Quoted in Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Poems, ed. Norma Millay (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), xxiii.
14. Charles Raus, Conversations with American Writers (New York: Knopf, 1985), 117.
15. McQuade, 2.
16. Raus, Conversations, 117.
17. McQuade, 2.
18. Kellner, 155.
19. Miriam Fuchs, “Interview with Marguerite Young,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 23.1 (2003), 129.
20. Kellner, 155.
21. Charles E. Raus, “Marguerite Young: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 66 (Fall 1977), 52.
22. Raus, “Art,” 52.
23. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1947, PPE SCUI.
24. Raus, “Art,” 52.
25. Kellner, 155.
26. Kellner, 152.
27. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 162–168, 48.
28. Marguerite Young, “Fictions Mystical and Epical,” Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 162. In her 1975 Harvard Advocate essay “Feminine Sensibility,” she claimed, “I do not think there is any difference between the works of men and women writers, and certainly do not think that women were limited, up to Virginia Woolf’s time, to the literature of inter-human relationships.” Marguerite Young, Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 144.
29. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, “A Conversation with Marguerite Young,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989), 150.
30. “Congratulations to New York Book Critic Sam Anderson!” New York Magazine, 14 January 2008.
31. Nona Balakian, “Marguerite Young—A Celebration,” 9 April 1983, Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.
32. Nona Balakian, “Marguerite Young, Innovator,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 4.
33. Quoted in Erika Duncan, “Marguerite Young: The Muse of Bleecker Street,” in Changes: A Journal of Arts and Entertainment [n.d.], Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.
34. Quoted in Duncan, “Marguerite Young.”
35. Vytas Valaitas, “A 1963 picture of Marguerite Young with the manuscript of her notably long novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” First published in William Goyen, “A Fable of Illusion and Reality,” New York Times, 12 September 1965, BR5.
36. Miriam Fuchs, ed., Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), xii.
37. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.
38. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.
39. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.
40. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 3 December 1947, PPE SCUI.
41. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.
42. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 11 April 1945, PPE SCUI.
43. Amy Clampitt, “Out of the Depressed Middle: The Imagination of Marguerite Young,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 5.
44. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, October 1945, PPE SCUI.
45. As quoted in front matter of Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. 2 (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1999).
46. Balakian, “Marguerite Young, Innovator,” 4.
47. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 3 December 1947, PPE SCUI.
48. Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128.
49. Levy, 129.
50. Peter Merchant, “My Marguerite Young,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 16.
51. Merchant, 14.
52. Merchant, 16.
53. Merchant, 15.
54. Merchant, 15.
55. Friedman and Fuchs, “A Conversation with Marguerite Young.”
56. Merchant, 15.
57. Merchant, 15.
58. Marguerite Young, “Inviting the Muses,” Mademoiselle, September 1965, 230.
59. Dennis Joseph Enright, Signs and Wonders: Selected Essays (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 35.
60. Marguerite Young, “On Teaching,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989), 164.
61. Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (New York: Scribner, 1965), 1.
62. Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, 1.
63. Hardwick, the wife of Robert Lowell, penned the novel in Iowa City while Lowell was teaching at the Workshop. The Simple Truth’s exploration of academic life at Iowa at the time of a lurid murder trial captured her imagination.
64. Marguerite Young to Leola Bergmann, 4 December 1983, Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.
65. Clampitt, 5.
6. The Turncoat: Robert Lowell
1. James B. Hall, “Our Workshops Remembered: The Heroic Phase,” 4, [n.d.], RIWW SCUI.
2. Robert Dana as quoted in Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 20.
3. Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 162–163.
4. Zlatko Anguelov, “Robert Lowell,” The Writing University, 5 January 2012, web.
5. Isabelle Travis, “ ‘Is Getting Well Ever an Art’: Psychopharmacology and Madness in Robert Lowell’s Day by Day,” Journal of Medical Humanities 32 (2011), 317; Richard Poirier, “Our Truest Historian,” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 11 October 1964: 1.
6. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 195.
7. Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 99.
8. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 150.
9. Richard Tillinghast, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 29.
10. Lowell, Letters, 64.
11. Tillinghast, 52.
12. William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 104.
13. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 167.
14. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 60–61.
15. Mariani, 56–57.
16. “Poet Robert Lowell Sentenced to Prison,” A&E Networks (12 August 2015), web. See also Lowell, Letters, 683.
17. Lowell, Letters, 683.
18. David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 99.
19. After two trials, the evidence of which drew from the accident, Stafford was awarded $4,000; Lowell, Letters, 680.
20. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 125.
21. Snodgrass, 125.
22. Robert Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 150.
23. Frank Bidart, Harvard Advocate 113.1–2 (November 1979), 12.
24. Tillinghast, 32.
25. Mariani, 88–89.
26. Mariani, 183.
27. Tillinghast, 52–51.
28. Axelrod, 23.
29. Snodgrass, 127–128.
30. Axelrod, 23.
31. Mariani, 190.
32. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 97–98.
33. Mariani, 191.
34. Hamilton, 168.
35. Mariani, 188.
36. Mariani, 182.
37. Mariani, 189.
38. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 98.
39. Lowell, Letters, 296.
40. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 98.
41. Jane Howard, “Applause for a Poet,” Life, 19 February 1965, 56.
42. Judith Baumel, “Robert Lowell: The Teacher,” Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979), 32.
43. Mariani, 192.
44. Levine, 165.
45. Levine, 163.
46. Joe Gould, an eccentric American writer during the 1940s whose ambition to write the longest book in history, called “The Oral History of the Contemporary World,” inspired similar reactions toward his authorial madness. Ezra Pound read a fragment of the manuscript and commented on it; Marianne Moore had solicited chapters of it for the Dial in the 1920s, before the journal folded with the stock market crash of 1929. The mental illness Gould suffered from, likely hypergraphia as Jill Lepore conjectures, was “a mania, but seems more like something a writer might envy, which seems even rottener than envy usually does, because Gould was a . . . madman.” Jill Lepore, “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” New Yorker, 27 July 2015, web.
47. Levine, 163.
48. Lowell’s poetry was controversial for bringing his insanity into focus, particularly in his writings of the late 1950s in which he ridiculed his parents and revealed his multiple hospitalizations for bipolar disorder; Travis, 317.
49. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 152.
50. Mariani, 191.
51. “Bednasek Says He’s Not Guilty of Murdering Beauty ‘I Loved,’ ” Daily Iowan, 13 December 1949, 1.
52. Elizabeth Hardwick, The Simple Truth (New York: Ecco, 1982), 17.
53. Hardwick, 16–17.
54. Hardwick, 78.
55. Lowell, Letters, 204.
56. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 8 February 1955, PPE SCUI.
57. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 131.
58. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 137.
59. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 131.
60. Hamilton, 196.
61. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 30 March 1955, PPE SCUI.
62. Doreski, 104.
63. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.
64. Hamilton, 196.
65. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.
66. Mary Jane Baker, “Classes with a Poet,” Mademoiselle 40 (1954), 106.
67. Jerome Mazzaro, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 55.
68. Quoted in Louis J. Budd, ed., Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 475.
69. Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” 153.
70. Baker, 106.
71. Hamilton, 198.
72. Baker, 137.
73. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 7 May 1955, PPE SCUI.
74. Baker, 141.
75. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.
76. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 8 February 1955, PPE SCUI.
77. Levine, 163–164.
78. Snodgrass, 139.
79. Mariani, 225.
80. Baker, 140.
81. Dinger, 22.
82. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 3 May 1957, PPE SCUI.
83. Dinger, 22.
84. Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 87.
85. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 86.
86. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 89.
87. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 97.
88. Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” 158.
7. Mad Poets: Dylan Thomas and John Berryman
1. Quoted in W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 135.
2. Snodgrass, 135, Ray B. West, Jr., “Dylan Thomas at Iowa,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 244.
3. Quoted in Barry Silesky, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time (New York: Warner, 1990), 25, 49.
4. Quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography (London: Phoenix Orion House, 2000), 279.
5. West, 244.
6. Silesky, 49.
7. Bill Read, The Days of Dylan Thomas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 140–141.
8. Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972), 200.
9. Ray B. West to Stephen Wilbers, 20 July 1976, RIWW SCUI.
10. West, 242.
11. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, ed. Paul Ferris (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1985), 765.
12. Quoted in Read, 137.
13. Thomas, Collected Letters, 762.
14. Thomas, Collected Letters, 762–764.
15. Thomas, Collected Letters, 764.
16. Ed Glinert, Literary London: A Street-by-Street Exploration of the Capital’s Literary Heritage (New York: Penguin, 2007), 83.
17. West, 235.
18. West, 257.
19. James Nashold and George Tremlett, The Death of Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997), 151.
20. Hilly Janes, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (London: Robson, 2014), e-book.
21. RIWW SCUI.
22. Quoted in Read, 150.
23. Quoted in Alan Norman Bold, ed., Cambridge Book of English Verse, 1939–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 61.
24. Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 166.
25. Levine, 166.
26. Robert Penn Warren to Stephen Wilbers, 1 September 1976, RIWW SCUI.
27. Frances Jackson to Stephen Wilbers, 1 March 1976, RIWW SCUI.
28. Philip Levine to Stephen Wilbers, 19 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
29. Philip Levine to Stephen Wilbers, 19 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
30. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 40.
31. Quoted in Paul L. Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 229.
32. Catherine Lacey, “Henry Doesn’t Have Any Bats,” Paris Review, 6 June 2013.
33. Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 111–112.
34. Richard J. Kelley, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 251.
35. Lacey.
36. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 412.
37. Kelley, 256.
38. Levine, 179.
39. Levine, 177.
40. Levine, 165.
41. Alan Golding, “American Poet-Teachers and the Academy,” A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, ed. Stephen Fredman (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 69.
42. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 2005 [1957]), 5–6.
8. Celebrity Faculty: Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving
1. Kurt Vonnegut, “New World Symphony,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 115.
2. Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Wilbers, January 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.
3. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Dial, 2009 [1961]), v.
4. Vonnegut, “New World Symphony,” 115.
5. Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Random House, 1982).
6. Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York: Random House, 2009), 85.
7. Thomas F. Marvin, Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), 9.
8. John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend (New York: Arcade, 1996), n.p., e-book.
9. Kurt Vonnegut, Letters, ed. Dan Wakefield (New York: Delacorte, 2012), 78.
10. Marvin, 9.
11. William Rodney Allen, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 107.
12. Allen, 107.
13. Vonnegut, Letters, 123.
14. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 200.
15. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 203.
16. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 201.
17. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” in Tomorrow, the Stars, ed. Robert A. Heinlein (New York: Signet, 1953), 39–50; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Big Trip Up Yonder,” in Assignment in Tomorrow, ed. Frederik Pohl (New York: Hanover House, 1954), 123–138, Science Fiction Collection, Hevelin Science Fiction Collection, SCUI.
18. Vonnegut, Letters, 100.
19. Max McElwain, Profiles in Communication: The Hall of Fame of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Iowa City: Iowa Center for Communication Study, 1991), 161.
20. Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 25.
21. Rabinowitz, 59.
22. Rabinowitz, 222.
23. Vonnegut, Letters [n.p., photo caption].
24. Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut’s America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 14.
25. Faculty Personnel Data Blank, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 22 September 1965, RIWW SCUI.
26. Kurt Vonnegut, “Have I Got a Car For You!” In These Times, 24 November 2004, web.
27. Klinkowitz, 15.
28. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 190.
29. Olsen and Schaeffer, 222.
30. Irving, Imaginary Girlfriend, [n.p., e-book].
31. Irving, Imaginary Girlfriend.
32. Vonnegut, Letters, 122–123.
33. Olsen and Schaeffer, 41.
34. Olsen and Schaeffer, 189.
35. Olsen and Schaeffer, 189.
36. Vonnegut, Letters, 106.
37. Richard Schickel, “Black Comedy with Purifying Laughter,” Harper’s [1st proof, galley 3062], May 1966, RIWW SCUI.
38. John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 15 April 1966, RIWW SCUI.
39. Vonnegut, Letters, 132.
40. Vonnegut, Letters, 106.
41. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 90.
42. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 91.
43. Vonnegut, Letters, 74.
44. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 288.
45. Vonnegut, Letters, 131.
46. Vonnegut, Letters, 119.
47. Rinehart had supported the Workshop since the 1940s with its fellowship, engineered by Engle, granting the publisher first rights to student and faculty works. The first of these works was Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which eventually landed with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
48. Vonnegut, Letters, 129.
49. Quoted in Robert Scholes, “ ‘Mithridates, He Died Old’: Black Humor and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” The Hollins Critic 3.4 (October 1966), 8.
50. John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 2 July 1965, RIWW SCUI; John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 14 March 1966, RIWW SCUI.
51. Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Wilbers, January 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.
52. Vance Bourjaily to John C. Gerber, 17 January 1966, RIWW SCUI.
53. Jerome Klinkowitz, The Vonnegut Statement (New York: Panther, 1975), 15.
54. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to John C. Gerber, 11 July 1965, RIWW SCUI.
55. Vonnegut, Letters, 116.
56. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 28.
57. Schaeffer and Olsen, 182.
58. Schaeffer and Olsen, 190.
59. Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Wilbers, January 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.
60. Kurt Vonnegut to John C. Gerber, 11 July 1965, RIWW SCUI.
61. Vonnegut, Letters, 116.
62. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, ed. Daniel Simon (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 41.
63. Vonnegut, Letters, 78.
64. Schaeffer and Olsen, 196.
65. Vonnegut, Letters, 398.
66. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 18.
67. Vonnegut, Letters, 121.
68. Vonnegut, Letters, 73.
69. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormenters,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 144.
70. Vonnegut, Letters, 132.
71. Schaeffer and Olsen, 218–219.
72. Schaeffer and Olsen, 199–200.
73. Schaeffer and Olsen, 121.
74. Connie Brothers, interview by David Dowling, Iowa City, Iowa, 2 December 2015.
75. Schaeffer and Olsen, 121.
76. Schaeffer and Olsen, 196.
77. Vonnegut, Letters, 117.
78. Vonnegut, Letters, 82.
79. His agent with the Cosby Bureau International sent a letter saying, “At Kurt Vonnegut’s request, I am returning $2,000 to you” as repayment for his late 1960s loan drawn from Workshop funds; Janet L. Cosby to Frank Conroy, 14 April 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
80. Vonnegut, Letters, 124.
81. Vonnegut, Letters, 139–140.
82. David H. Lynn, “Editor’s Notes,” Kenyon Review 18.3–4 (Summer–Autumn 1996), 1.
83. Vonnegut, Letters, 130.
84. Vonnegut, Letters, 119.
85. Gail Godwin, “Kurt Vonnegut: Waltzing with the Black Crayon,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 219–220.
86. Schaeffer and Olsen, 155.
87. Schaeffer and Olsen, 236.
88. Anis Shivani, “Iowa Writers’ Workshop Graduate Spills It All: Interview with John McNally, Author of After the Workshop,” Huffington Post, 25 May 2011, web.
89. Schaeffer and Olsen, 155.
90. Schaeffer and Olsen, 190.
91. Godwin, 222.
92. The only extant version of Vonnegut’s profile of Conroy is a fax he sent to the Workshop in 1990, which reads as follows.
FRANK CONROY I have known for a long time (having tried so hard to play the clarinet and the piano that musicians are in some way radically different from the rest of us). My friend Frank Conroy is a jazz pianist. (And a good one.) It was once explained to me (by a man who talks through his hat even more than I do) that musicians process music with that part of their brain meant to be used for ordinary language (for routine blah, blah, blah, Chinese, or French, or English, or whatnot). Witness Mozart (as fluent in music when a toddler as other toddlers in Salzburg were in German). If that isn’t true about musicians, I don’t want to hear so. It is too pretty a piece of information for me to do without. Which brings us to Conroy and Fats Waller. (Where else could we be at this point?) Conroy is as arch and dainty at a keyboard as Waller was. He also writes that way. (And also mentions Waller.)
Which brings us to dealing with unhappy memories by means of art. (Where else could we be at this point?) One can safely assume (I assume) that Waller (being both fat and black in America) had many unhappy memories. (Some of them probably are no more than five minutes old). So does Frank Conroy, although he is tall and white and skinny. I know this from what he chooses to write about. (Peace be to Philip Roth and Erica Jong, et al. who waste so much time denying that they are characters in their fictions.)
Yes, and Conroy, whether writing or playing the piano, by force of will and talent review bad memories in tones and cadences which I said before are arch and dainty. (Why shouldn’t I repeat myself if something I’ve said is good and true?) One thinks (I think) of all the jazz musicians who let agony show through the rips in their otherwise seamless performances, or even played nothing but rips and never mind the fabric. (Rips? Riffs? The same?) Some say that was what made them great. But Waller achieved greatness without doing that. (Not even when playing and singing “Black and Blue.”)
Miracle.
I am entitled to call Conroy childlike, since he is eleven years my junior. But I would call him that even if he were my great-grandfather. You should see him when he plays the piano. He is like a child (Waller as a toddler?), amazed by the enchanting sounds he makes so easily. I have never watched him write. (Has anybody?) But he must be similarly amazed. (Almost goofy with delight).
Kurt Vonnegut to Frank Conroy, 23 April 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
93. Correspondence of Kurt Vonnegut, 20 May 1988, RIWW SCUI.
94. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 122.
9. Infidels: Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo
1. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships, 17 May 2005, American Public Media.
2. Renee H. Shea, “A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros,” in Sandra Cisneros in the Classroom: “Do Not Forget to Reach,” ed. Carol Jago (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002), 33.
3. Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 178.
4. Olsen and Schaeffer, 230–231.
5. Wolfgang Binder, ed., “Sandra Cisneros,” Partial Autobiographies: Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets (Erlangen: Verlag, Palm & Enke, 1985), 64.
6. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 149–150.
7. Grimes, 149–150; Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, eds., Conversations with Ishmael Reed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 59.
8. Binder, 64.
9. Ramola D., “An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” Writer’s Chronicle 38.6 (Summer 2006), 6.
10. Brooks Landon, conversation with David Dowling, 18 September 2015, Iowa City, Iowa.
11. Olsen and Schaeffer, 188.
12. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 18 September 2015, Iowa City, Iowa.
13. Olsen and Schaeffer, 188.
14. Carmen Haydee Rivera, Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 24.
15. Joy Harjo, The Last Song (Albuquerque: Puerto del Sol, 1975).
16. Joy Harjo, The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, ed. Laura Coltelli (Ann Arbor: University Press of Michigan, 1996), 114.
17. Olsen and Schaeffer, 152.
18. Harjo, Spiral, 114.
19. Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 50.
20. Dinger, 47.
21. Dinger, 47.
22. Dinger, 41.
23. Dinger, 48.
24. Dinger, 42.
25. Olsen and Schaeffer, 153.
26. Rita Dove, Conversations with Rita Dove, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 16.
27. Olsen and Schaeffer, 153.
28. “Joy Harjo,” in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets, ed. Stephen Kuusisto et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 84.
29. Joy Harjo, “My Sister, Myself: Two Paths to Survival,” Ms., September/October 1995, 73.
30. Rhonda Pettit, Joy Harjo (Boise: Boise State University Press, 1988), 9; Harjo, “My Sister,” 71.
31. Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2006), 64.
32. Olsen and Schaeffer, 54.
33. “Joy Harjo’s ‘Crazy Brave’ Path to Finding Her Voice,” National Public Radio, 9 July 2012, web.
34. Olsen and Schaeffer, 64.
35. Olsen and Schaeffer, 64.
36. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
37. Joy Harjo, “Poems from ‘What Drove Me to This’ and from ‘She Had Some Horses,’ ” MFA thesis, University of Iowa, May 1978, 20.
38. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
39. Harjo, MFA thesis, 17.
40. Harjo, MFA thesis, 29.
41. Harjo, Spiral, 70.
42. Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 211.
43. Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 35; Rivera, 63.
44. Harjo, Spiral, 70.
45. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (New York: Vintage, 2009), 97.
46. Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 100.
47. Rivera, 22.
48. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
49. Sandra Cisneros, Foreword, Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students, Gregory Michie (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), ix.
50. Penelope Mesic, “Sandra Cisneros,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 69, ed. Roger Matuz (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992), 144.
51. Olsen and Schaeffer, 239.
52. Olsen and Schaeffer, 62.
53. Olsen and Schaeffer, 187.
54. Olsen and Schaeffer, 230.
55. Olsen and Schaeffer, 190.
56. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
57. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
58. Olsen and Schaeffer, 191–192.
59. Stephanie Vanderslice, “Once More to the Workshop: A Myth Caught in Time,” in Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? ed. Dianne Donnelly (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 32.
60. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
61. Olsen and Schaeffer, 106.
62. Tracy Kidder, interview with David Dowling, 24 November 2015, Iowa City, Iowa.
63. Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (New York: Knopf, 2015), e-book.
64. Cisneros, “Introduction: A House of My Own,” in The House on Mango Street, xvi.
65. Cisneros, A House of My Own.
66. Olsen and Schaeffer, 171, 98.
67. Olsen and Schaeffer, 217.
68. Olsen and Schaeffer, 222.
69. “Sandra Cisneros: I Hate the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” WNYC interview, 23 April 2009, web.
70. Olsen and Schaeffer, 219.
71. “Sandra Cisneros,” WNYC interview.
72. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
73. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships.
1. Zlatko Anguelov, “Marvin Bell,” The Writing University, web.
2. Charles Bullard, “U of I Writers’ Workshop Graduate Appointed to be U.S. Poet Laureate,” Des Moines Register, 19 May 1993, [n.p.], Student Records: Rita Dove, RIWW.
3. “Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo,” Literary Friendships, American Public Media, 17 May 2005.
4. Rita Dove, Conversations with Rita Dove, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 15–16.
5. Barbara Yost, “Memories and Magic: Dove’s Pulitzer,” July/August 1987, 18, Student Records: Rita Dove, RIWW.
6. Dove, Conversations, 16.
7. Yost, 18, Student Records: Rita Dove, RIWW.
8. Dove, Conversations, 16.
9. Dove, Conversations, 16.
10. Renee H. Shea, “American Smooth: A Profile of Rita Dove,” Poets and Writers, September/October 2004, 41.
11. Dove, Conversations, 16.
12. Yost, 19, Student Records: Rita Dove, RIWW.
13. Robert McDowell, “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove,” Callaloo 9.1 (1986), 61.
14. Rita Dove, “The Discovery of Oranges,” MFA thesis, University of Iowa, May 1977, 18–19.
15. Dove, Conversations, 98.
16. Max McElwain, Profiles in Communication (Iowa City: Iowa Center for Communication Study, 1991), 164.
17. Dove, Conversations, 17.
18. Dove, Conversations, 72.
19. Dove, Conversations, 16–17.
20. Dove, Conversations, 15.
21. Dove, Conversations, 17.
22. Dove, Conversations, 18.
23. Conversation with Fred Viebahn, 18 October 2016, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.
24. Yost, 18–19, Student Records: Rita Dove, RIWW.
25. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 December 2015, Iowa City, Iowa.
26. Dove, Conversations, 28.
27. Rita Dove, Through the Ivory Gate (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 1.
28. William Walsh, “Isn’t Reality Magic? An Interview with Rita Dove,” Kenyon Review 16.3 (1994), 150.
29. Dove, Conversations, 165.
30. Malin Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 74; see also Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12 (Winter 1989): 233–243.
31. Dove, MFA thesis, 29.
32. Pereira, 75.
33. Dove, Conversations, 98.
34. Dove, Conversations, 98.
35. Therese Steffen, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.
36. Theodore O. Mason, “African-American Theory and Criticism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 15–16.
37. Dove, Conversations, 21.
38. Dove, MFA thesis, 26.
39. Walsh, 149.
40. Dove, Conversations, 22.
41. Dove, Conversations, 22–23.
42. Quoted in Elizabeth Alexander, The Power of Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 52.
43. Steffen, 169.
44. Steffen, 12–13.
45. Steffen, 171.
46. Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar, “An Interview with Maryse Condé and Rita Dove,” Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 234. See also Pat Righelato, Understanding Rita Dove (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 7.
47. Patricia Kirkpatrick, “The Throne of Blues: An Interview with Rita Dove,” Hungry Mind Review 35 (1995), 57.
48. Steffen, 7.
49. Dove, MFA thesis, 5.
50. Dove, Conversations, 27.
51. Steffen, 169.
52. The strong current of German literature and culture that runs through the heart of Dove’s corpus began in Iowa with a poem called “The Bird Frau.” In it, she portrays a German mother awaiting the return of her son from war. The wait grows torturous, claiming her sanity; she “fed the parakeet,/ broke its neck.” She then resolves to “Let everything go wild,” losing herself among the trees, floating about them and singing “like an old rag bird” herself. “She ate less, grew lighter, air tunneling/ through bone, singing.” Passing children flee as she hauntingly beckons them with her small song, “Ein Liedchen, Kinder!” (a little tune, children!). The poem’s arresting denouement appears in a moving tableau of her “Rudi, come home on crutches,” his birdlike “thin legs balancing this atom of life.” Dove, MFA thesis, 42. This lyrical portrait of a mother driven mad by the prospect of the loss of her son in battle extends beyond the inner angst that transforms her life into a birdlike existence. Her modernist Imagism in this case is imbued with subtle yet powerful political commentary on the larger devastating effects of war that extend beyond its soldiers and reach deep into the hearts and minds of their loved ones on the home front. Indeed, the bird lady is a casualty of war here, as her love for her son eerily transforms her into the birdlike form that he himself embodies when he arrives on thin legs propped up by crutches.
53. Steffen, 171.
54. Righelato, 13.
55. McElwain, 163.
56. Eric Bennett writes, “After 1967, there is no trace in the public archives of CIA funding for writing at Iowa, either for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or the International Writing Program,” although Engle had accepted funds from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was proven to be a CIA front. Bennett points out that although many have suspected this as evidence of “conspiracies lurking behind the façade of American reality,” he found “no evidence that the CIA money influenced writing at Iowa,” and that such “relatively benign activity” instead fits into the broader historical pattern of the cultural cold war.” Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 113; Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
57. McElwain, 164.
58. Bennett, 113.
59. Ekaterini Georgoudaki, “Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries,” Callaloo 14.2 (1991), 420.
60. Righelato, 13.
61. Dove, Conversations, 159.
62. Steffen, 170.
63. Steffen, 170.
64. Steffen, 14–15.
65. Rita Dove, The Yellow House on the Corner (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Press, 1980), 64.
66. Dove, Conversations, 112.
11. The Genius: Jane Smiley
1. Quoted in Neil Nakadate, Understanding Jane Smiley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 6.
2. Nakadate, 7.
3. Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted To Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 186.
4. Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (New York: Random House, 2005), 3.
5. Jane Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” Mentors, Muses, and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, ed. Elizabeth Benedict (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 261.
6. Olsen and Schaeffer, 185.
7. Olsen and Schaeffer, 185.
8. Olsen and Schaeffer, 185.
9. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 87.
10. One scene particularly captured how these volatile ingredients funneled into male authorial ambition. As Glen Schaeffer recalled, “At the time, not a weekend went by that Mailer wasn’t in the news for punching someone in an expensive Manhattan restaurant.” Literature and boxing became seamless, since Mailer’s most recent book, The Fight, detailed the “rumble in the jungle” featuring Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Schaeffer’s Workshop instructor, Vance Bourjaily, claimed that Mailer had trained for his public altercations. At a pig roast he was hosting for the graduate students, Bourjaily suggested only half-jokingly that Schaeffer challenge Mailer to a fight. “We were all drunk,” Schaeffer explained, “and I believe John Falsey egged it on.” Bourjaily’s suggestion was not entirely in jest, since he was a long-standing friend of Mailer’s from his early days in New York City. The aging Mailer, then in his early fifties like Bourjaily, might represent the older generation at the bout billed as “an exhibition at Iowa.” There he could prove “that theirs was the baddest generation.” Schaeffer proposed that he could write up the event as a participatory MFA thesis in the spirit of Frederick Exley’s Fighting Norman Mailer. They abandoned the idea, however, when Schaeffer realized that if he was to trounce Mailer in the ring, he would be maligned for destroying a beloved icon, and if he lost, he and his generation would suffer total humiliation. Olsen and Schaeffer, 182–183.
11. Olsen and Schaeffer, 218.
12. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
13. Smiley’s revelation of the abuse endured by her female classmate behind closed doors points to a pattern of patriarchal control over burgeoning female creativity that traces back to the nineteenth century. In Fanny Fern’s fictional autobiography Ruth Hall, from 1855, we hear of the entrapment of the young, precocious female writer at the hands of an aggressive editor who attempts to seize and monopolize her talent as his own. “Stay!” exclaimed her editor, “placing his hand on the latch,” the symbol of his attempt to lock her into exclusive publishing rights. She eludes him, to his frustration, while he shouts, “I’ll have my revenge” as “the last folds of her dress fluttered out the door.” Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 157.
14. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
15. Mary Ann Cain, “ ‘A Space of Radical Openness’: Re-Visioning the Creative Writing Workshop,” Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? ed. Dianne Donnelly (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 220.
16. Cain, 221.
17. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin, 2014), 54.
18. Carmen Haydee Rivera, Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2009), 22.
19. Olsen and Schaeffer, 227.
20. Olsen and Schaeffer, 200.
21. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
22. T. Coraghessan Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 9.
23. Nakadate, 6–7.
24. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 265.
25. Jane Smiley, “Swiss Family Schaeffer,” Nation, 15 October 2007, 32–36.
26. Olsen and Schaeffer, 78.
27. Olsen and Schaeffer, 99.
28. Josh O’Leary, “Smiley Discusses ‘Prophetic’ Book,” Iowa City Press Citizen, 27 October 2015, 1A-8A, Alumni Files, RIWW SCUI.
29. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
30. Jane Howard, Families (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1978), 247.
31. Howard, 256.
32. Howard, 254.
33. Howard, 222.
34. Philip Roth, “Iowa: A Very Far Country Indeed,” Esquire, December 1962, 132.
35. Howard, 253.
36. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 267.
37. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
38. Howard, 17.
39. Olsen and Schaeffer, 186.
40. Dwight Garner, “Allan Gurganus,” Salon, 8 December 1997, web.
41. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
42. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 262–263.
43. In Good Prose, Kidder recalls how he “said harsh, dismissive things about other students’ stories, precisely because they were no worse than my own, and sometimes even better.” He resolved to “submit as little as possible to workshops” to avoid the abuse he witnessed, such as that of a woman who “after her story had been pummeled a while, stood up and declared to the class, ‘This is a story about a lot of beautiful people, and a lot of beautiful things going down!’ and stalked out of the room.” Kidder recalled his classmates attacking one another’s writing through withering slights that included “ ‘pretentious, sentimental, boring, and Budweiser writing.’ ” Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (New York: Random House, 2013), 137–138.
44. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
45. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
46. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
47. Stephanie Vanderslice, “Once More to the Workshop: A Myth Caught in Time,” in Does the Workshop Still Work? ed. Dianne Donnelly (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 31.
48. Olsen and Schaeffer, 100.
49. Quoted in Garner.
50. Jane Smiley, “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” in The Age of Grief: A Novella and Stories by Jane Smiley (New York: Knopf, 1987), 64.
51. Smiley, “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” 65.
52. Jane Smiley, Note to “Long Distance,” in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 377.
53. Jane Smiley, “A Reluctant Muse Embraces His Task, and Everything Changes,” in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times, ed. John Darnton (New York: Times Books, 2001), 222.
54. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 267.
55. On December 15, 1973, just two years before Smiley’s composition of “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in the DSM-II Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “LGBT Rights Milestones,” CNN Library, 30 October 2015, web. This helps contextualize the gender ideology deployed in the story as far more progressive than it appears from a twenty-first-century vantage point.
56. Connie Brothers, interview by David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
57. Jane Smiley, “Curriculum Vita,” Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
58. Robert McPhillips, “Jane Smiley’s People,” Washington Post, 19 November 1989, 8, Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
59. Jay Schaefer, “Dentist, Bombs, and a Seducer,” San Francisco Chronicle [n.d.], Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
60. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley,” New York Times, 26 August 1987, C21, Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
61. Olsen and Schaeffer, 78.
62. Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, 372–373.
63. Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’ ” Harper’s, January 1996, 61. This article pioneered the alternative feminist approaches to the American male literary canon, paving the way for recent journalism that has called into question monuments like Henry David Thoreau, as in Kathryn Schulz’s “Pond Scum,” New Yorker, 29 October 2015, web.
64. For a defense of Twain arguing that he should not be held to the standard of “Smiley’s modern political sophistication,” see Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 196. Underwood points out that since Twain “is certainly no contemporary liberal,” he should not be expected to be a “model of contemporary political correctness,” especially given “his sentimental view of his Missouri upbringing, his brief service with the Missouri troops opposing the Union Army, and his insulting statements about Native Americans in his other works” (196).
65. Underwood, 197.
12. Red High-Tops for Life: T. C. Boyle
1. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 230.
2. Olsen and Schaeffer, 230.
3. Jef Tombeur, “An Unpublished Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Auteurs.net, April 1989, web.
4. T. C. Boyle, World’s End (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), ix.
5. Elizabeth E. Adams, “T. Coraghessan Boyle: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 161 (2012), web.
6. Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, Literary Friendships, American Public Media, 17 May 2005.
7. Paul Gleason, Understanding T. C. Boyle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 1.
8. Gleason, 1–2.
9. T. C. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 7.
10. T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Greasy Lake,” in Greasy Lake and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 2.
11. Tombeur.
12. Anthony DeCurtis, “T. Coraghessan Boyle: A Punk’s Past Recaptured,” Rolling Stone, 14 January 1988, web.
13. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
14. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl, For Carl Solomon,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959), 9.
15. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
16. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
17. Adams.
18. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
19. Adams.
20. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 7–11.
21. Adams.
22. Olsen and Schaeffer, 231.
23. Gleason, 2.
24. Nelson Algren, The Last Carousel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 77.
25. Olsen and Schaeffer, 79.
26. Scott Rettberg, “Scott Rettberg Interviews T. C. Boyle,” Auteurs.net, 23 November 1998.
27. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 December 2015.
28. Adams.
29. Rettberg.
30. Rettberg.
31. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 11.
32. Olsen and Schaeffer, 232.
33. Adams.
34. Adams.
35. Judith Handschuh, “T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Bookreporter, 1998–2000, accessed 26 January 2016, web.
36. Adams.
37. Algren, 77.
38. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), 65.
39. Algren, 77.
40. Tombeur.
41. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 10.
42. Olsen and Schaeffer, 169.
43. Olsen and Schaeffer, 227.
44. Rettberg.
45. Cameron Martin, “T. C. Boyle: An Email Dialogue with Cameron Martin,” Barnes and Noble Review, 9 February 2009, web.
46. Olsen and Schaeffer, 239, 118.
47. Martin, “T. C. Boyle: An Email Dialogue.”
48. Adams.
49. Mark Mittlestadt, “Grace and Rubies ‘Not Private,’ ” Daily Iowan, 27 February 1976, 3.
50. Diane Friedman, “City Holds Keys to Grace and Rubies,” Daily Iowan, 31 August 1976, 6.
51. Mittlestadt, 3.
52. Boyle, Descent of Man, 95.
53. Boyle, Descent of Man, 84.
54. Boyle, Descent of Man, 98.
55. Boyle, Descent of Man, 97–98.
56. Patricia Lamberti, “Interview with T. C. Boyle,” Other Voices 33 (Fall–Winter 2000), web.
57. T. Coraghessan Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 306–307. In addition to Irving’s inspiration, Dickens provided Boyle’s model for simultaneously reaching highbrow readers and a mass audience, in a piece flush with literary allusions—“Lysistrata, Gertrude Stein, Carrie Nation” along with Melville and Dickens—but with unmistakable appeal to readers of Penthouse who would delight in a scenario involving an obsessed, Ahab-like monomaniac’s mission to infiltrate the women-only restaurant. Boyle, Descent of Man, 85.
58. Friedman, 6.
59. Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” 306.
60. Boyle, Descent of Man, 85.
61. A closer examination of Boyle’s stories in the collection Descent of Man reveals a pattern of brutality and sexist attitudes toward women, though thoroughly satirized and obviously not condoned. The title story, “Descent of Man,” for example, begins with the line, “I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink” (3). It goes on to tell a surreal tale of sexual competition according to the magical realist plot of a love triangle between the jealous narrator, his anthropologist wife, and her chimpanzee subject, who becomes her lover. The story features hilarious instances of the protagonist measuring himself against an ape, a rival who bests him physically and intellectually. Aghast that the creature has cleaned out their provisions, the narrator demands an explanation from his wife, who says he is “a big, active male and that she can attest for his need for so many calories” (14).
Other instances give pause, such as the widely anthologized “Greasy Lake,” in which Boyle’s alarmingly sympathetic narrator nearly commits the act. Set on an empty beach, his story “Drowning” depicts a random act of violence evocative of Camus’s The Stranger. Lacking the humor of “Descent of Man” and the madcap antics of “A Women’s Restaurant,” it evokes the nadir of man’s regression to primitive impulsive violence. The story portrays the violation of a sole sunbather not only by the fat social misfit who encounters her while combing the beach, but a group of fishermen who are the woman’s would-be rescuers. Yet another figure who might save her drowns at sea. The dark view of humanity impinges directly on the violation of the female body, as with so many of the stories in Descent of Man.
62. Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” 306–307.
63. The piece stands along with Iowa graduate Robert Bly’s men’s counter-movement—yet hardly so pious and self-righteous—as another backlash against first-wave feminism from the Workshop. Like Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Boyle glories in the physical kinetic ballet of fight scenes—the “Greasy Lake” narrator takes a kick to the face described like a high-stepping majorette—among characters whose motives for brawling are as absurd as they are comic, and often impulsive to the point of social deviance glimpsing a dark nihilistic universe.
64. “Grace and Rubies Restaurant,” Lost Womyn’s Space, 16 December 2011, web.
65. Lynne Cherry, “Grace and Rubies: A Women’s Haven,” Daily Iowan, 31 May 1977.
66. “Our Correspondents: Iowa City,” Dyke: A Quarterly 2 (1977), 86.
67. Olsen and Schaeffer, 310.
13. The Mystic: Marilynne Robinson
1. “Courses,” Iowa Student Information System, University of Iowa, web.
2. Bryan Appleyard, “Marilynne Robinson, Word’s Best Writer of Prose,” Times (London), 21 September 2008, web.
3. Wyatt Mason, “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson,” New York Times Magazine, 1 October 2014, web.
4. Marilynne Robinson, interview with David Dowling, 13 April 2016, email.
5. “Marilynne Robinson,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central), 8 July 2010, web video; “UI Professor on ‘The Daily Show,’ ” Iowa City Press Citizen, 10 July 2010, RIWW UISC.
6. President Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson, “President Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa,” New York Review of Books, 5 November 2015.
7. Joe Fassler, “Marilynne Robinson on Democracy, Reading, and Religion in America,” Atlantic, 16 May 2012.
8. Abby Aguirre, “The Story Behind President Obama’s Interview with Marilynne Robinson,” Vogue, 14 October 2015, web.
9. Ross Posnock, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xiv. Ellison wrote more than two thousand pages of his second novel but never finished it, perhaps the most bizarre quagmire following a famous first novel according to Wil Haygood, “The Invisible Manuscript,” Washington Post, 19 August 2007, web.
10. Emma Brockes, “A Life in Writing: Marilynne Robinson,” Guardian, 29 May 2009, web.
11. Jonathan Lee, “Interview with Marilynne Robinson, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction,” National Book Foundation, [n.d.], retrieved 1 March 2016, web.
12. Brockes.
13. Marilynne Robinson, “Being Here,” University of Iowa Presidential Lecture, 14 February 2010, web [video].
14. Although the film adaptation of Robinson’s Housekeeping received positive reviews, she objected to Columbia Pictures and director Bill Forsyth’s deviation from her novel’s conclusion. Jason W. Stevens, ed., This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), xii.
15. Quoted in Chad Wriglesworth, “Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,” in This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, ed. Jason W. Stevens (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 101.
16. Jason Stevens, “Marilynne Robinson: A Chronology,” in This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, ed. Jason W. Stevens (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), xiii.
17. James H. Maguire, Reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (Boise: Boise State University Press, 2003), 11.
18. Maguire, 11.
19. Wriglesworth, 102.
20. Sarah Fay, “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198,” Paris Review 186 (2008), 60.
21. Susan Sontag to Frank Conroy, 6 April 1992, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
22. Frank Conroy to Susan Sontag, 6 April 1992, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
23. Brockes.
24. Karen Armstrong, “Marilynne Robinson’s ‘The Givenness of Things,’ ” New York Times, 7 December 2015, web.
25. Stevens, xi.
26. Lisa Durose, “Marilynne Robinson: A Bibliography,” American Notes and Queries 10.1 (Winter 1997): 31–46.
27. “Writers’ Workshop Professor Wins $250,000 Prize,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 5 February 1998, RIWW SCUI.
28. Mason.
29. Gigi Wood, “Local Author in National Spotlight,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 20 November 2004, web.
30. Bob Abernethy, “Marilynne Robinson, Extended Interview,” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, 18 September 2009, web.
31. For an excellent example of her holograph manuscripts, see pinterest.com, https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c7/2a/45/c72a45fcc1e6aff26b6a35f8a60fc3c3.jpg.
32. Emily Bobrow, “Meeting Marilynne Robinson,” Economist, 21 May 2011, web.
33. Mason.
34. Marilynne Robinson, “By the Book,” New York Times, 7 March 2013, web.
35. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 133–134.
36. Jane Mulkerrins, “Marilynne Robinson: The Pulitzer Prize Winning Author on Her New Book,” Telegraph, 18 October 2014, web.
37. For more on the social commentary describing “intense interior lives” in Robinson’s fiction, especially about the “transition from domesticity to indigence,” see Maggie Galehouse, “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 117–137.
38. Mason.
39. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959), 30.
40. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 7.
41. Stevens, xi.
42. Robinson, Gilead, 19.
43. For more on Emerson’s appreciation of Humboldt and the astronomer’s adoption by New England transcendentalist intellectuals, see Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
44. Abernethy.
45. Abernethy.
46. Mason.
47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972), 1:10.
48. David Dowling, Emerson’s Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 20, 255.
49. Robinson, Gilead, 246.
50. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 329.
51. Robinson, Gilead, 246.
52. Robinson, Gilead, 247.
53. Mason.
54. Abernethy.
55. Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
56. Abernethy.
57. “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa,” New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015, 6.
58. Marilynne Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities: In Defense of America’s Best Idea,” Harper’s, March 2016, 30; Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Marilynne Robinson to Lecture on Crisis in Higher Education,” Des Moines Register, 16 November 2016, web.
59. Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Graduate Employee Union Rips UI President Choice,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 4 September 2015, web.
60. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 37.
61. Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 3–4.
62. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 37.
63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 93.
64. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 30.
65. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 92.
66. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 84.
67. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 99.
68. Fay, 38.
69. Meghan O’Rourke, “A Moralist of the Midwest,” New York Times Magazine, 24 October 2004, web.
70. O’Rourke.
71. Thessaly Le Force, “A Teacher and Her Student,” Vice, 18 June 2013, web.
72. Le Force.
73. Marilynne Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 157.
74. Julia Shriver, “Robinson to Receive Award,” Daily Iowan, 10 July 2013, RIWW SCUI.
75. Le Force.
76. Dowling, 86.
77. Lee, “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.”
78. Robinson, “Fear,” New York Review of Books, 24 September 2014, web.
79. Fay, 39.
80. Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” 159.
81. Robinson, “By the Book.”
82. Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” 159.
14. The Warrior: Anthony Swofford
1. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003), 70; Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die,” in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, ed. Dianne Wood Middlebrook (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 98.
2. Swofford, Jarhead, 71.
3. Swofford, Jarhead, 71.
4. Anthony Swofford, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir (New York: Hachette, 2012), 204.
5. Swofford, Hotels, 234.
6. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Interview with Anthony Swofford: Unscrewing Jarhead,” Combustible Celluloid, 24 October 2004, web.
7. Anderson.
8. Swofford, Jarhead, 1.
9. Swofford, Jarhead, 1.
10. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
11. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 3.
12. Jon Robert Adams, Male Armor: The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 124.
13. Swofford, Jarhead, 11, 254.
14. Anthony Swofford, “Foreword,” in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, ed. Gerald Nicosia (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), xxi–xxiii.
15. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Random House, 2013 [1929]), 32.
16. Lyne Gabriel, “A Soldier from a Familiar Part of Town,” Daily Iowan, 29 January 2004, p. 4C.
17. Swofford, Jarhead, 10, 11.
18. Nathaniel Fick, “How Accurate Is Jarhead? What One Marine Makes of the Gulf War Movie,” Slate, 9 November 2005, web.
19. Anthony Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” MFA thesis, University of Iowa, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, May 2001, iii.
20. Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes, Universal Pictures, 2005, DVD, supplementary material.
21. Swofford, Jarhead, 247.
22. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1982), 54.
23. Swofford, Jarhead, dust jacket.
24. William T. Vollmann, “Military Brats in Love,” New York Times Book Review, 14 January 2007, web.
25. As quoted in Fick.
26. Vollman.
27. Swofford, Jarhead, 34, 36.
28. Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, “Gulf War Memoir Syndrome,” Texas Observer, 12 September 2003, web.
29. Adams, 116.
30. Mark Bowden, “The Things They Carried,” New York Times, 2 March 2003, web.
31. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: A Warrior Haunted by Ghosts of Battle,” New York Times, 19 February 2003, web.
32. Matt Schudel, “Frank Conroy; Author and Iowa Writers’ Workshop Director,” Washington Post, 7 April 2005, web.
33. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
34. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
35. William L. Hamilton, “At Home with Chris Offutt: Learning Not to Trespass on the Gently Rolling Past,” New York Times, 18 April 2002, web.
36. Chris Offutt, “My Dad, the Pornographer,” New York Times Magazine, 5 February 2015, web.
37. Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” 32.
38. Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” 56–57.
39. “Interview with Anthony Swofford,” Iowa Review, April 2015, web.
40. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 6 April 2016, email.
41. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
42. Stephen Bloom, “He Was Tough and Generous,” Chicago Tribune, 10 April 2005, Sect. 2, pp. 1–4.
43. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
44. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 7 April 2016, email.
45. Stephen Elliott, “Interview with Anthony Swofford,” Believer, February 2007, web.
46. Reza Aslan, “Reza Aslan Reading, Live from Prairie Lights,” 7 April 2005, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, Iowa Digital Library.
47. Frank Conroy to Pinckney Benedict, 25 May 1988, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
48. James Michener to Frank Conroy, 26 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
49. Frank Conroy to Erik Nelson, 22 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
50. James Michener to Frank Conroy, 26 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
51. Paul Sorenson, “Stuck in the Desert of Romance,” Daily Iowan, 24 January 2007, 7A.
52. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 6 April 2016, email.
53. In collaboration with director Sam Mendes, Swofford narrated and co-produced Semper Fi and Jarhead Diaries, documentary material bundled with the DVD of Jarhead released in 2005. Jarhead Diaries focuses on the making of the film, and Semper Fi was designed to acknowledge and respect the American troops who were still on the front lines of battle in Iraq. It profiles the homecoming experience of several Marine combatants. Swofford was a co-presenter and fellow memoirist with his wife Christa Parravani at several events in and around New York City. “Book Launch: Her by Christa Parravani with Anthony Swofford,” The Powerhouse Arena, 5 March 2013.
54. Swofford, Hotels, i.
15. The Voice: Ayana Mathis and Mass Culture
1. Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005), 118; David Pesci, “The Oprah Effect: Texts, Readers, and the Dialectic of Signification,” Communications Review 5.2 (2002): 143–178.
2. Hardy Green, “Why Oprah Opens Readers’ Wallets,” Business Week, 9 October 2005, web.
3. David Daley, “Ayana Mathis: Oprah Winfrey Is on the Phone and a Career Is Born,” Salon, 16 December 2012, web.
4. Patricia Sellers, “The Business of Being Oprah,” Fortune, 1 April 2002, web.
5. Daley.
6. Daley.
7. Jonathan Lee, “A Question of Faith,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, 15 May 2013, web.
8. Daley.
9. Matthew Salesses, “When Defending Your Writing Becomes Defending Yourself,” NPR: Code Switch, Frontiers of Race, Culture, and Identity, 20 July 2014, web.
10. Lynn Neary, “In Elite MFA Programs, the Challenge of Writing While ‘Other,’ ” NPR: Code Switch, Frontiers of Race, Culture, and Identity, 19 August 2014, web.
11. Sheryl McCarthy, “One to One: Ayana Mathis, Author, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” CUNYtv, 22 January 2013, web video.
12. McCarthy.
13. Daley.
14. McCarthy.
15. Julie Mannell, “University of Iowa Fail,” Community on BuzzFeed, 24 March 2015, web.
16. Minnesota’s Mayo Medical School, the educational counterpart of the Mayo Medical Clinic, had a 2.1 percent acceptance rate in 2018; Alyssa Rege, “10 Medical Schools with the Lowest Acceptance Rates,” Becker’s Medical Review, 3 April 2018, web. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s admission of 25 students out of 1,026 applicants for fall 2015 yielded an acceptance rate of 2.4 percent. Yale Law School’s acceptance rate was 8.4 percent in 2017.
17. Neary.
18. Neena Andrews, “Oprah Talks to Ayana Mathis,” O, The Oprah Magazine, South Africa, March 2013, web.
19. Daley.
20. Daley.
21. Daley.
22. Ayana Mathis, “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” [excerpt], MFA thesis, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2011, 18–20.
23. Mathis, “Twelve Tribes,” 21.
24. Mathis, “Twelve Tribes,” 22.
25. Werner Huber et al., Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Wiesbaden, Germany: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2005).
26. Ayana Mathis, “What Will Happen to All of That Beauty,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, 15 December 2014, web.
27. Oprah Winfrey and Ayana Mathis, “Exclusive Webisode: Author Ayana Mathis’ Three Greatest Lessons,” Oprah.com, February 2013, web.
28. Winfrey and Mathis, “Three Greatest Lessons.”
29. Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (New York: Knopf, 2012).
30. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 131, 135.
31. Christopher Clair, “ ‘It Still Doesn’t Quite Seem Real’: Writers’ Workshop Alumna Mathis Experiencing Post-Oprah Whirlwind,” Iowa Now, 1 February 2013, web.
32. Dan Barden, “Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes,” Poets and Writers (March/April 2008), 87.
33. As quoted in Michael Parks, “On the Write Track: A University of Arkansas Program Has Trained Students in the Nuts and Bolts of Producing Good Fiction and Poetry for 40 Years,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 3 April 2008, E6.
34. Torres’s own fame, driven mainly by his memoir, is immediately visible in mass culture in Salon’s selection of him among the sexiest men of 2011, the year he graduated from the Workshop. “Salon’s Sexiest Men of 2011,” Salon, 17 November 2011, web.
35. Ramin Setoodeh, “ ‘Girls’ Finale: Director of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Weighs In,” Variety, 24 March 2014, web.
36. Daley.
37. McGurl, 301.
38. Anis Shivani, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2011), 170.
39. McGurl, 301.
40. Shivani, 172.
41. McGurl, 229.
42. Clair.
43. Siddhartha Deb and Ayana Mathis, “Why Get an MFA?” New York Times, 18 August 2015, web.
44. Shivani, 153–155.
45. Junot Díaz, “MFA vs. POC,” New Yorker, 30 April 2014, 32.
46. Deb and Mathis.
47. Neary.
48. Anthony Swofford, interview by David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
49. Deb and Mathis.
50. Shivani, 172.
51. Daley.
52. E. I. Johnson, “Famous Literary Agent: Ellen Levine,” The View from the Top: Interviews with Industry Experts, 7 June 2007, web.
53. Jeff Charis-Carlson and Zach Berg, “Marilynne Robinson Retiring from Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 27 April 2016, web.
54. McCarthy.
55. Mathis, Twelve Tribes, 9.
56. Nicole Mowbray, “Oprah’s Path to Power,” Guardian, 3 March 2003, web.
57. Andrews.
58. Neary.
59. McCarthy.
60. R. Jackson Wilson, “Emerson as Lecturer: Man Thinking, Man Saying,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79.
61. Shivani, 170; also see McGurl on professionalism in MFA programs, 55, 95, 409.
62. Lee.
63. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 105.
64. Lee.
65. Lee.
66. Craig L. Garthwaite, You Get a Book! Demand Spillovers, Combative Advertising, and Celebrity Endorsements, National Bureau of Economic Research, no. w17915, 2012.
67. Collins, 105.
68. Kisha, “African-American Historical Fiction Discussion: Ayana Mathis’s ‘Twelve Tribes of Hattie,’ ” Goodreads, 19 March 2014, 10:39 A.M., web.
69. Felicia R. Lee, “Novelist’s Debut Is Newest Pick for Oprah’s Book Club,” New York Times, 5 December 2012, web.
70. Nicole Nichols and Wendy Luckenbill, “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Announces Its Second Selection, ‘The Twelve Tribes of Hattie’ by Ayana Mathis,” Discovery Press Web, 5 December 2012, web.
71. Shivani, 290.
72. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 219.
73. Shivani, 290.
74. Jason Boog, “Top 10 Bestselling Books in Oprah’s Book Club,” GalleyCat, 23 May 2011, web.
75. Mathis did not comment in response to my questions as to whether she would actively pursue a mass audience such as Oprah’s Book Club readers again with her next project. Ayana Mathis, correspondence with David Dowling, 30 April 2016.
76. Olsen and Schaeffer, 294.
77. Olsen and Schaeffer, 185.
78. Hector Tobar, “Melodrama Overtakes Mathis’ ‘Twelve Tribes of Hattie,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2012, web.
79. Garthwaite, 60.
80. Communications scholar Janice Radway explains how participation in book clubs can function as “narrative therapy,” especially through immersion in story worlds that leave the reader “earless, eyeless, motionless for hours.” Such deep reading provides “the cure of interlocking dreams” to counter anxiety, fear, and loneliness. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 15. For more on the culture and gender politics of audience in popular literature, see Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
81. Lee.
82. Collins, 103.
83. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 142.
84. “Ayana Mathis: 2013 National Book Festival,” Library of Congress National Book Festival, Library of Congress, 14 January 2014, web video.
Epilogue
1. Plaque Dedicated to Paul Engle, Literary Walk, Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, Iowa.
2. Paul Engle’s Plot, Oakland Cemetery, Iowa City, Iowa (Photo by Travis Vogan).
3. Loren Glass, “Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” Minnesota Review (Winter/Spring 2009), 10.
4. Zlatko Anguelov, “Paul Engle,” The Writing University, web.
5. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), ix.
6. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 707.
7. In 2000, then governor Tom Vilsack designated October 12, Engle’s birthday, as “Paul Engle Day,” naming him “Iowa’s Poet of the Century.” Merrill persuaded UNESCO to establish two projects that bear Engle’s name, the Paul Engle Prize, an annual literary award first given to Workshop faculty member James Alan McPherson in 2011, and the Glory of the Senses high school essay contest.
8. Frank Conroy to Jack Leggett, 10 May 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The stigma of Engle was behind Conroy’s refusal of an offer from highly acclaimed poet and Workshop alumnus Robert Dana to provide a one-day workshop and reading from his latest book. Dana had been a longtime Engle ally, making his otherwise reasonable bid unconscionable to Conroy, who disingenuously alluded to “the sad news of the current budget crunch” despite the Workshop’s flush financial situation. The Workshop, as he reported to former director John Leggett, in fact “was in fine shape” financially, enjoying “four years of the highest salary increases in the College of Liberal Arts.” Frank Conroy to Robert Dana, 7 October 1991; Frank Conroy to Jack Leggett, 10 May 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
9. Glass, 10.
10. “The Mighty Big Ten Versus the Ivy League” [Advertisement for Holiday] Michigan Alumnus 73.13 (16 February 1957), 230.
11. Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 21–22.
12. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Paul Engle, 6 November 1962, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
13. “A Day Celebrating the Friends of the Writing Program at The State University of Iowa,” 18 September 1962, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
14. “11 Students at S.U.I. Win Industries’ Writing Grants,” Des Moines Register, 24 November 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
15. J. M. Hickerson to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
16. J. M. Hickerson to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
17. Another emblematic instance of Engle’s use of Workshop student writing for public relations appeared in a promotional piece published in the magazine Transmission: Northern Gas Company. The full-page advertisement for the Workshop trumpeted, “Writers with the creative urge find fertile ground for literary development at the State University of Iowa’s . . . [in large letters below] WRITERS’ WORKSHOP.” The text below continues the pitch: “In the Workshop a writer is exposed to intensive discussion and demonstration of all elements of writing as well as to an extensive sampling of the literature of all times and all countries.” Following the advertisement is a short story titled “Beany” credited to Workshop student Andy Fetler. Northern Gas Company was of course one of Engle’s many corporate sponsors. In this case, as with the agreement contracted with advertising agent J. M. Hickerson, Inc., students’ writing functions as advertising. [Advertisement for Iowa Writers’ Workshop], Transmission: Northern Gas Company 10.1 (1962), 15, PPE SCUI.
18. Robert Dana, ed., A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), ix.
19. Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut Letters, ed. Dan Wakefield (New York: Delacorte Press, 2012), 132.
20. Joan Rattner to Paul Engle, 16 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
21. Popular audiences with literary or high cultural pretensions formed Engle’s target market for publicity, as seen in the libretto of an opera he wrote for Hallmark’s Hall of Fame television program. In bringing high culture to the masses, Engle worked closely with Webster Schott at Hallmark, who also read the manuscript of his book Western Child and offered suggestions. Webster Schott to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
22. The prospect of teaching creative writing as the primary means of living presumably supplemented by royalties from one’s publications, according to Workshop MFA Geoffrey Wolff, suggests that the employment of creative writers by the academy is corrupt. Real authors, he argues, need no institutional shelter from the market. “Those who can’t, teach; those who can, sell to Dreamworks and Disney,” he urges, noting “it’s always risky to accuse others of selling out,” typically novelists such as Workshop graduates Max Allan Collins and David Morrell brokering deals with movie producers for their work. Geoffrey Wolff, “Communal Solitude,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 107. The justification of selling to Disney as validation of one’s literary worth is evident in Director Frank Conroy’s promotion of his students for the Disney Studios’ Apprenticeship Writers’ Program with Walt Disney Pictures and Television. Judy Weinstein to Frank Conroy, 18 January 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
23. “The Writer in Mass Culture,” Transcript, SCUI; Dorothy Collin, “Four Writers Will Speak at 2-Day Session,” Daily Iowan, 4 December 1959.
24. Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Staff, in conversation with David Dowling, Iowa City, Iowa, 13 October 2015.
25. Nicholas M. Kelley, “Mapping the Program Era: Sample Data Visualizations,” The Program Era Project, 31 May 2016, web.
26. Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 112, 196 n. 114.
27. Bennett, 112.
28. “Engle Denies Charges of Red Ties,” Tuxedo, N.Y., 9 November, A.P. “Paul Engle Denies He Has Un-American Committee Listing” [newspaper clippings, n.d., no journal titles], PPE SCUI.
29. Grimes, The Workshop, 708.
30. Grimes, The Workshop, 708.
31. Grimes, The Workshop, 709.
32. Grimes, The Workshop, 707, 710, 714.
33. Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 February 2014, web.
34. Grimes, The Workshop, 654.
35. Grimes, The Workshop, 709.
36. Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir (Portland, Ore.: Tin House, 2010), 31.
37. Kent Williams, “Workshop Woes: A Supposedly Bad Thing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Did to Literature,” Little Village, 20 February 2014, web.
38. David Foster Wallace, “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” Harper’s (January 1996), 41.
39. Wallace, 42.
40. Wallace, 42–43.
41. Wallace, 43.
42. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925 [2004]), 54.
43. Wallace, 43.
44. Grimes, Mentor, 8–9. As described in chapter 15, Reza Aslan similarly was appalled at the deceptive bait-switch tactic by which Conroy lured him into thinking he was a “pet” only to blindside him with a humiliating vivisection in his first showing at workshop. Aslan swears by Conroy’s teaching, insisting that all the knowledge necessary for his authorial career he acquired in the director’s seminar. Reza Aslan, “Reza Aslan Reading, Live from Prairie Lights,” 7 April 2005, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, Iowa Digital Library.
45. Email correspondence, Lan Samantha Chang to David Dowling, 8 June 2016.
46. Ellis is an African American, which complicates the racial dynamics of the narrative of what Joy Harjo characterized as a predatory atmosphere in the program between male faculty, most of whom where white, and their female students, one that traces back at least to the 1950s. Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer, eds. We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 64.
47. Jia Tolentino, “Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?” Jezebel, 28 March 2016, web; Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Writers’ Workshop Professor Still Employed After Classes Canceled, Reassigned,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 11 May 2016, web. For the testimony of the eleven women alleging sexual misconduct perpetrated by Workshop faculty member Thomas Sayers Ellis, see “Reports from the Field: Statements Against Violence,” VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 6 March 2016, web.
48. David McCartney, email correspondence with author, 11 November 2017.
49. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 144.
50. Frank Conroy to Norman Mailer, 19 April 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
51. Tolentino.
52. Paul Engle, ed., Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (New York: Random House, 1961), xxii.
53. Anguelov.
54. Snodgrass, 124.
55. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), xxiii.
56. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, xxi; “ ‘Yes’ Is the Basic Attitude at S.U.I., Atkinson Finds,” Des Moines Register, 12 May 1961, PPE SCUI. Atkinson was the New York Times reporter who had published a feature story on the Workshop in 1961.
57. Grimes, The Workshop, 707.
58. Mike Klein, “This Place in Iowa Makes World Famous Writers,” Des Moines Register, 13 April 2016, web.
59. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 December 2015.
60. A number of strenuous arguments to the contrary have arisen in defense of the Workshop on the issue of uniformity of writing in an institutionalized setting. Frank Conroy, for example, denied these allegations in a two-page typed statement apparently intended for public relations purposes that appears in his Director’s file. In it, he objects to the charge—perhaps most visibly made by Nelson Algren in 1973 in The Last Carousel—that “first novels of short-stories are shallow, naïve, slick, and jejune, so the argument goes, because they were written in Workshops made up of graduate students who know nothing about life and hence have nothing to write about.” Conroy insists, “its [sic] a facile argument that sounds okay until one examines the rather arrogant assumptions that lie behind it,” namely that “some other environment exists—a garret, perhaps, with attendant poverty, loneliness and despair—that would turn out better writers.” He debunks the idea that “a Golden Age” existed “before workshops, when people learned in the school of hard knocks and produced great stuff.” His points are compelling until he overextends himself with the claim that “most first novels of fifty years ago are forgotten now, and weren’t any better than contemporary work. I dare say they were worse.”
In justifying contemporary literature, Conroy of course is defending his own dual role as contemporary author and facilitator of contemporary literary production as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But he contradicts his sweeping defense of contemporary literature in his attempt to refute the assertion that “Conformism! Writing by committee!” lurks behind the system of weekly meetings, presided over by an older writer, of young writers reading and responding to each other’s work. Conroy alludes to his experience as reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, “in which I read thousands of manuscripts”—all contemporary—“from all over the country and noticed more conformity, and especially conformity to the aesthetics of the marketplace,” posited as a far more pernicious source than a creative writing program, “in non-workshop writers than I did in those writers attending the numerous MFA programs spread out over the nation.” A litany of Iowa Writers’ Workshop authors then follows as evidence of the eclectic nature of such programs, yet not successfully disproving the allegation of conformist writing since each was trained in a radically different era: “its [sic] hard for me to connect people like Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, Tracy Kidder, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ethan Canin, or T.C. Boyle, except that they’re all fine writers.” Frank Conroy, circa 1989 [n.d.], RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
61. Klein.
62. Ethan Canin, “Smallness and Invention; or, What I Learned at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 26.
63. Grimes, The Workshop, 716.
64. Grimes, Mentor, 220.
65. Grimes, The Workshop, 717.
66. Laurie Van Dyke, “Both Engle Captors Nabbed,” 4 August 1959, Cedar Rapids Gazette; Laurie Van Dyke, “Paul Engles Tell Gazette of Ordeal,” 2 August 1959, Cedar Rapids Gazette, PPE SCUI.
67. Van Dyke, “Both Engle Captors Nabbed”; Van Dyke, “Paul Engles Tell Gazette of Ordeal.”
68. Paul Engle, “Introduction” to Midland, manuscript draft, PPE SCUI.
69. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Random House, 1969), v.
