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Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could.
Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany.
Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.
Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany.
Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.
248 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 15, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 25, 2015
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As a survivor of an MFA program, there are a lot of ways I would describe writing workshops, but until reading this book I never imagined a connection to the Cold War. Leave it to the University of Iowa Press, the publishing wing of the school that invented the Platonic form of the modern workshop, to offer this rich, counterintuitive history of the MFA.
These days, there’s nothing very revolutionary about a creative writing program. In fact, I still refer to mine as a conformative writing program, since anything that deviated from the cookie-cutter formula was dismissed.
But following World War II, Bennett argues, there developed an optimism that “the complexity of literature” would fend off the proliferation of simple sloganeering. Advances in science and technology had created weapons of terrifying power. It was time to advance the study of human nature, which happened to coincide with an increase in college attendance, thanks to the GI Bill.
“To understand creative writing in America, even today, requires tracing its origins back to the apocalyptic fears and redemptive hopes that galvanized the postwar atmosphere,” Bennett writes.
I’ve often mused about how the World Wars produced more great fiction writers than any others, and Bennett helps explain (in part) why this was: “Veterans wanted to write, and taxpayers were willing to pay for it.”
Bennett’s focus is on the Cold War era, particularly two of the most influential figures in the history of the MFA: Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner (who founded the programs at Iowa and Stanford respectively).
It’s a fascinating read and should be required reading for anyone enrolled in or considering an MFA program.
As a survivor of an MFA program, there are a lot of ways I would describe writing workshops, but until reading this book I never imagined a connection to the Cold War. Leave it to the University of Iowa Press, the publishing wing of the school that invented the Platonic form of the modern workshop, to offer this rich, counterintuitive history of the MFA.
These days, there’s nothing very revolutionary about a creative writing program. In fact, I still refer to mine as a conformative writing program, since anything that deviated from the cookie-cutter formula was dismissed.
But following World War II, Bennett argues, there developed an optimism that “the complexity of literature” would fend off the proliferation of simple sloganeering. Advances in science and technology had created weapons of terrifying power. It was time to advance the study of human nature, which happened to coincide with an increase in college attendance, thanks to the GI Bill.
“To understand creative writing in America, even today, requires tracing its origins back to the apocalyptic fears and redemptive hopes that galvanized the postwar atmosphere,” Bennett writes.
I’ve often mused about how the World Wars produced more great fiction writers than any others, and Bennett helps explain (in part) why this was: “Veterans wanted to write, and taxpayers were willing to pay for it.”
Bennett’s focus is on the Cold War era, particularly two of the most influential figures in the history of the MFA: Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner (who founded the programs at Iowa and Stanford respectively).
It’s a fascinating read and should be required reading for anyone enrolled in or considering an MFA program.
July 16, 2022
I went into this expecting less history of aesthetics and more history of institutions and structures. Despite that, it crystallized some observations I'd made of literary aesthetic hierarchies, clarified some of the early history of creative writing as a discipline, and gave me a lot to think about. It was a genuinely engrossing read, even when it wasn't the book I was hoping for. I would have loved to see more consideration of poetry. The biggest takeaway was a better understanding of the extent to which the highly politicized aesthetics of (implicitly white, straight, and cis male) Cold War individualism are prescribed and valorized as good craft, even to this day.
October 3, 2023
Not being American, but reading a lot of American literature, it's hard to avoid the influence of the Iowa Writing Programme in the post war period right up to today. Both poets and novelists, initially male and white, have emerged with a particular discipline of creativity focusing on the individual life, their interior space and a spare, direct writing style that can sometimes morph into flatness.
What is less well known is that the programme owes its existence to the Cold War. Bennett, a graduate of the MFA course, explores how Paul Engle established the school driven by a zeal, common to many in the post war period , to counter the extreme ideology of fascism and communism with a push to promote liberal democracy. The idea that reading great novels or poems would encourage complexity of thinking and realisation that other people, different to ourselves, matter had been established before the war but after today vile devastation of WW2 Engle was able to harness funding in order to establish a viable faculty.
Stegner was an early disciple and went on to establish another programme at Stamford , with a focus on The West and belonging, erasing the First Americans completely in his work, published late in his career.
Of particular interest is the masculinity of the programme, with its GI Bill intake. Hemingway, a recognized and popular figure, with his simple prose style acted as a template for many.
What is less well known is that the programme owes its existence to the Cold War. Bennett, a graduate of the MFA course, explores how Paul Engle established the school driven by a zeal, common to many in the post war period , to counter the extreme ideology of fascism and communism with a push to promote liberal democracy. The idea that reading great novels or poems would encourage complexity of thinking and realisation that other people, different to ourselves, matter had been established before the war but after today vile devastation of WW2 Engle was able to harness funding in order to establish a viable faculty.
Stegner was an early disciple and went on to establish another programme at Stamford , with a focus on The West and belonging, erasing the First Americans completely in his work, published late in his career.
Of particular interest is the masculinity of the programme, with its GI Bill intake. Hemingway, a recognized and popular figure, with his simple prose style acted as a template for many.
June 6, 2022
I was impressed by Mark McGurl's The Program Era, which tries to demonstrate how the rise of the Iowa-type writing program shaped American literary production in the second half of the twentieth century. As someone trying to write fiction, I've wondered where the so-called "rules" of writing good prose come from. Bennett accomplishes even more, arguing that what's become a kind of orthodoxy in the writing programs (personal over social, concrete over abstract, etc.) has historical roots in the anti-totalitarian project of Cold War politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Anyone who's ever read a "how to write" book will immediately recognize the precepts he's discussing, now able to see the historical roots for these. The chapters on Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner, founds of the Iowa and Stanford writing programs, sometimes seem too enamored with archival documents, to the extent that they seem to lose track of the book's central argument. Most interesting is the last chapter, which persuasively argues the unlikely pair of Hemingway and Henry James actually put forth many of the ideas undergirding writing classes today.
March 21, 2016
A really interesting look at the connections between the birth of the American creative writing workshop and the Cold War: i.e., the workshop as a crucible for American--read non-communist--values, which was how Paul Engle, founder of the Iowa workshop, sold his program to the foundations that helped fund its early years. The chapter on Stegner suggests the extent to which Stanford's MFA program was likewise a figuring forth of its founder's personality. Much more readable than McGurl's 'The Program Era,' though the two books should probably be read together. Bennett, who did his MFA at Iowa, digs up some really fun things in the archives.
January 1, 2023
Synthesis of history, politics, and literature telling part of the story of why American Letters were the way they were through 1985. Today's literature is definitely still shaped (limited) by the themes discussed, as writer after writer in today's world trained with the teachers who learned from the authors discussed here. The authors discussion of powers that be's preference for individualism, and their shying away from treating systemic concerns, made me see our world and national conversation with a new perspective.
January 2, 2017
im going to take the concluding page as a positive affirmation of the urgent necessity of stalinist fiction for the modern age.
Want to read
October 21, 2021Recmd by Adam J.
July 13, 2025
J'ai été un peu déçu par ce livre : si sa thématique, l'émergence de l'écriture créative comme discipline académique au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale et au début de la guerre froide, m'intéressait et si certains passages m'ont plu, j'ai globalement que le propos est peu accessible quand on ne connait pas bien l'histoire de la littérature américaine au XXe siècle.
October 8, 2020
Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett is a look at the expansion of American creative writing. Bennett is an associate professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the author of A Big Enough Lie, and his writing has appeared in A Public Space, New Writing, Modern Fiction Studies, Blackwell-Wiley’s Companion to Creative Writing, The Chronicle of Higher Education, VQR, MFA vs. NYC, and Africana.
The Cold War was a changing point in American thinking. Gone was the idea of a collective society that pulled together to fight fascists and a return to the individual became prominent. Collectivism meant communism and communism was wrong. One only had to look at 1950s Science fiction movies to see this. Collectivism was evil and the hero always an individual who stood apart. Dr. Miles Bennell stood against a town of pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Steve McQueen stood alone against a town that refused to believe The Blob was real. Perhaps without noticing America rejected the collective identity and moved into individualism.
The other great change that materialized during the early years of the Cold War was education. The G.I. Bill put a college education within the reach of many who would not have attended college before. America had an educated public beyond the privileged class. With the rise in education, literature started to rise.
"In magazines large and small, reactionaries competed with radicals for the attention of well-educated readers."
...
"America writers and intellectuals affiliated with that "vital center" believed that the complexity of literature provided an antidote to sloganeering amidst slogans run amok. No more Arbeit macht frei; no more Workers of the world unite! "
Literary modernism grew out of the interwar period and gave rise to writers such as TS Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, who wanted to overturn the discipline of literary form. Stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, and a mistrust of traditional power became the norm. Opposing the modernism was New Humanism championed by Irving Babbitt. New Humanism fought to capture the glory of the past in literature. The Great Depression, however, damaged the New Humanist movement as the country now saw failure in the ideas of the past and looked for help outside of individual responsibility. Like American politics, American literature was also trapped in a struggle between liberals and conservatives. Workshops of Empire highlights this struggle and the results in literature and the rise of creative writing at the university level.
Bennett covers the history of creative writing and its champions and detractors. He makes an interesting point about the development of creative writing and high taxes. Oppressive tax rates actually encouraged the Rockefeller Foundation to give money to university programs. Creative writing programs, to a great degree, were funded by corporate donations and grants. Bennett also includes biographies of Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Wallace Stegner, the founder of the creative writing program at Stanford. He concludes his study with a comparison of Hemingway and Henry James.
Today many college educated students and even high school students take courses in creative writing as part of their English curriculum without much thought of its history. The idea of creative writing being part of the English curriculum is coming into question more so today. English is the study of rules and form. Creative writing is self-expression and creative writing is a fine arts degree taught in workshops rather than seminars. This issue has not been settled.
Having a masters degree in political science puts me on the outside looking in on the role of creative writing, but leaves me on the inside as far as the history and the Cold War that influenced it. Workshops of Empire offered me an insight into the change in American writing, education and thinking based on concepts that I already understood but the effects I never noticed in writing. As a latecomer to poetry, I found this book enlightening and an explanation of how writing changed from Whitman to Eliot to Ginsberg to winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
The Cold War was a changing point in American thinking. Gone was the idea of a collective society that pulled together to fight fascists and a return to the individual became prominent. Collectivism meant communism and communism was wrong. One only had to look at 1950s Science fiction movies to see this. Collectivism was evil and the hero always an individual who stood apart. Dr. Miles Bennell stood against a town of pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Steve McQueen stood alone against a town that refused to believe The Blob was real. Perhaps without noticing America rejected the collective identity and moved into individualism.
The other great change that materialized during the early years of the Cold War was education. The G.I. Bill put a college education within the reach of many who would not have attended college before. America had an educated public beyond the privileged class. With the rise in education, literature started to rise.
"In magazines large and small, reactionaries competed with radicals for the attention of well-educated readers."
...
"America writers and intellectuals affiliated with that "vital center" believed that the complexity of literature provided an antidote to sloganeering amidst slogans run amok. No more Arbeit macht frei; no more Workers of the world unite! "
Literary modernism grew out of the interwar period and gave rise to writers such as TS Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, who wanted to overturn the discipline of literary form. Stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, and a mistrust of traditional power became the norm. Opposing the modernism was New Humanism championed by Irving Babbitt. New Humanism fought to capture the glory of the past in literature. The Great Depression, however, damaged the New Humanist movement as the country now saw failure in the ideas of the past and looked for help outside of individual responsibility. Like American politics, American literature was also trapped in a struggle between liberals and conservatives. Workshops of Empire highlights this struggle and the results in literature and the rise of creative writing at the university level.
Bennett covers the history of creative writing and its champions and detractors. He makes an interesting point about the development of creative writing and high taxes. Oppressive tax rates actually encouraged the Rockefeller Foundation to give money to university programs. Creative writing programs, to a great degree, were funded by corporate donations and grants. Bennett also includes biographies of Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Wallace Stegner, the founder of the creative writing program at Stanford. He concludes his study with a comparison of Hemingway and Henry James.
Today many college educated students and even high school students take courses in creative writing as part of their English curriculum without much thought of its history. The idea of creative writing being part of the English curriculum is coming into question more so today. English is the study of rules and form. Creative writing is self-expression and creative writing is a fine arts degree taught in workshops rather than seminars. This issue has not been settled.
Having a masters degree in political science puts me on the outside looking in on the role of creative writing, but leaves me on the inside as far as the history and the Cold War that influenced it. Workshops of Empire offered me an insight into the change in American writing, education and thinking based on concepts that I already understood but the effects I never noticed in writing. As a latecomer to poetry, I found this book enlightening and an explanation of how writing changed from Whitman to Eliot to Ginsberg to winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
December 4, 2025
It's so delightful when a book you've never heard of, about a topic you know nothing about and have no real connection to, is blindly recommended by a library booklist (and not an algorithm thank you very much...a list put together by an actual librarian!) and it ends up being fantastic!
Workshops of Empire is a relatively brief but highly informative history of how the United States used MFA creative writing programs (primarily out of the University of Iowa) to preach American cultural values during the Cold War. As part of the "soft power" campaign to win hearts and minds around the globe, programs curated writers (many/most of whom on the GI Bill) to write novels that celebrated individualism and Western humanism, to counter the Soviet values of collectivism. The book details how authors such as Hemingway (masculine, rugged, sparse, fiercely individualistic) were celebrated and used as templates for proper writing, creating a literary culture that influenced the course of American fiction.
I have no background or understanding of the world of creative writing and MFA programs, but Workshops of Empire is accessible enough for someone like me. The chapter on Paul Engle is particularly revelatory, mapping how the young author from America's heartland began his poetry career as a bleeding heart socialist before pivoting toward fierce American values. He was particularly savvy at collecting federal and private money, with organizations ranging from the State Department to the Rockefeller Foundation pouring money into his Iowa Writers' Program coffers to fly in budding authors from global Cold War hotspots such as Japan and Vietnam.
It does seem that recently there's been a glut of media about the soft power tactics of the CIA during the Cold War, from funding writers and cultural magazines to visual artists and jazz musicians. Workshops of Empire is a solid piece of scholarship that contributes to the conversation on the government's role in culture.
Workshops of Empire is a relatively brief but highly informative history of how the United States used MFA creative writing programs (primarily out of the University of Iowa) to preach American cultural values during the Cold War. As part of the "soft power" campaign to win hearts and minds around the globe, programs curated writers (many/most of whom on the GI Bill) to write novels that celebrated individualism and Western humanism, to counter the Soviet values of collectivism. The book details how authors such as Hemingway (masculine, rugged, sparse, fiercely individualistic) were celebrated and used as templates for proper writing, creating a literary culture that influenced the course of American fiction.
I have no background or understanding of the world of creative writing and MFA programs, but Workshops of Empire is accessible enough for someone like me. The chapter on Paul Engle is particularly revelatory, mapping how the young author from America's heartland began his poetry career as a bleeding heart socialist before pivoting toward fierce American values. He was particularly savvy at collecting federal and private money, with organizations ranging from the State Department to the Rockefeller Foundation pouring money into his Iowa Writers' Program coffers to fly in budding authors from global Cold War hotspots such as Japan and Vietnam.
It does seem that recently there's been a glut of media about the soft power tactics of the CIA during the Cold War, from funding writers and cultural magazines to visual artists and jazz musicians. Workshops of Empire is a solid piece of scholarship that contributes to the conversation on the government's role in culture.
August 28, 2020
I found the subject matter and thesis interesting, and it's exhaustively researched. However, I found it read like a dissertation-dry, long winded, and obtuse. I couldn't help but feel it needed another pass at being edited down for book publication. That said, it's still a good read, especially for anyone interested in this sort of thing, and it did raise questions I'd never thought to ask-like so many I've always taken creative writing techniques to be sorry of eternal truths I guess, but this shed light on its development and on particular differences in techniques through time.
August 6, 2025
Most of the stuff went over my head because it's got academic jargon in it, but it's an otherwise impeccable rendering of the origin of MFA programs in the United States.
June 11, 2023
intro + chapter 2 was a 5/5, the rest was 2/5 and a slog
July 27, 2015
I loved this study. While it is in conversation with McGurl, it is not a companion piece. The book is extremely well researched and offers a great explanation for why new criticism still has a strong stranglehold, as well as offering a fascinating history which was new to me. I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in American lit, especially 20th century.
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July 30, 2016I found this history of MFA programs incredibly interesting as both a writer and a reader. The Cold War had a profound effect on fiction--one that we should think about critically. Yet most of us don't even know about it!
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