A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Authors’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty

As the world’s preeminent creative writing plan, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing quantity of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six US poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This quantity follows the program from its rise to prominence in the first 1940s under movie director Paul Engle, who marketed the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism.

Designed to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, assistance and rivalry. Concentrating on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program-such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson-David Dowling examines how the Iowa Authors’ Workshop has designed professional authorship, posting industries, as well as the course of American literature.