Paul Engle
Long before Iowa City officially was dubbed a City of Literature, Paul Engle helped make it just that.
The poet and author led the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to prominence and co-founded the International Writing Program also at the University of Iowa. He was responsible for bringing such luminaries to UI as Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Flannery O’Conner, John Irving, James Michener and Kurt Vonnegut, transforming Iowa City into a destination for writers from all corners of the world.
“He created it out here in the Midwest at a state university where the extended support for writing and writers was supposed to be on the East Coast,” said former Workshop student and professor Marvin Bell upon Engle’s death in 1991.
Engle was born in 1908 in Cedar Rapids, where he grew up on a farm and began writing poetry as a student at Washington High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Coe College and master’s from UI, where he was one of the first students to receive an M.A. in creative writing. He went on to study at Columbia University and as a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College at Oxford.
He returned to UI to teach in 1937 and took over the directorship of the Workshop in 1941, a post he would hold for 25 years. In 1967, Engle co-founded the International Writing Program with his second wife, Chinese novelist and translator, Hauling Nieh.
Under Engle’s direction and tireless fundraising, the Workshop grew from just a dozen students during World War II to more than 100, and he divided the school into separate fiction and poetry sections — a format still in place.
Engle wrote and edited more than 20 books and was a three-time recipient of Guggenheim fellowships in poetry. In 1976, former senator, diplomat and U.N. Ambassador Averrill Harriman nominated Engle and his wife for a Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the International Writing Program.