A Community of Writers
In 1939, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop became the first degree-granting, creative writing program in the country. Since then, Workshop graduates and faculty have garnered 23 Pulitzer Prizes. For all of its stature, however, there had never been an historical exhibition about the Workshop and the other creative writing programs at The University of Iowa, including the International Writing Program.
In
October 2007, a year-long exhibit that I curated opened on the UI campus
in the Old Capitol Museum. Combining papers, photographs, posters,
original manuscripts and first-edition books, the exhibit provided
a context for why and how some of the greatest contemporary writers
came to Iowa. One of the gems of the exhibit was Flannery O’Connor’s
master’s thesis, displayed for the first time. Following is the
wall text.
Flannery O’Connor came to the University of Iowa in 1946 ostensibly as a journalism student. It didn’t take her long, however, to inform Writers’ Workshop Director Paul Engle of her true intentions. “I am a writer,” she told him in their first meeting. Her Georgia accent was so thick, that Engle asked her to write what she was trying to say to him on a pad of paper. Based on a few samples, he let her into the Workshop, even though the semester was already underway. “Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English,” he recalled, “Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.”
O’Connor was a contradiction. She was too shy to read her own stories aloud—Engle did it for her—but she was also tough skinned and responded quickly to criticism in her meticulous revisions. “The will to be a writer was adamant,” Engle wrote of her later. “Sitting at the back of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing-class with their loudness. The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she sat in glowed.”She was also determined to succeed. The summer before submitting her MA thesis, Flannery O’Connor published its title story, “The Geranium,” in a literary magazine. Later, she would incorporate it into her novel Wise Blood (1952). Despite her short life—O’Connor died from lupus at age 39—she is one of the most celebrated writers of the mid-20th century. Her stories from the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find have been widely anthologized. Another critically acclaimed collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965.