cover image Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War

Eric Bennett. Univ. of Iowa, $22.50 ISBN 978-1-60938-371-8

Novelist Bennett (A Big Enough Lie) takes a look at American creative writing programs that avoids the tired “New York or MFA?” question. Instead, he considers how M.F.A. writing programs first emerged in the U.S., and how creative writing gained recognition as an academic discipline. Specifically, he examines two groundbreaking figures—poet, critic, and editor Paul Engle, founder of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and novelist and historian Wallace Stegner, founder of Stanford’s M.F.A. program—who were influenced in equal measure by personal visions for American literature and by the larger forces of Cold War politics. Along the way, Bennett probes various contributing factors, including the rise of the New Humanism, fear of totalitarianism, academic ambivalence toward popular culture and advertising, and the merging of corporate and government interests in combating communism. The territory and the prose may prove a tad dry for casual readers, but for students of American history and literature, or academics interested in the history of creative writing, this text provides fertile ground for discussion and thought. (Oct.)