The Prairie Propagandists

To haters who think that a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing means dropping $75,000+ for a degree that equips one for nothing but downward mobility, I submit this: a reclusive high-profile filmmaker who haunted the MFA program at my graduate institution was rumored to offer an annual six-figure prize to the student who wrote the screenplay he liked best. In his energetic and engaging new study Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, Eric Bennett shows that it was ever thus. In 1955 Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures’ TV production division, asked Paul Engle, the director of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, to “pass along student stories to be considered for television adaptation” (94). (Engle, surely, got a cut.) Engle had a similar arrangement with Doubleday. Anecdotes like this aside, Bennett’s book is not really about exposing the swamp of graft and slush money that is the American academic creative writing world. Rather, Bennett here excavates the ideological origins of postwar creative writing programs and finds that they were designed, incidentally or expressly, to promote an individualistic, humanistic view of the world that would serve American Cold War interests. This view of the world, Bennett argues, drew upon the secularist, ethically focused “New Humanism” of the early twentieth century elaborated by Irving Babbitt and others and brought to the creative writing world by Norman Foerster, who taught Engle and Wallace Stegner at Iowa.

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