The Making of the Creative Writing Program

Granting graduate credit for fiction and poetry in 1936, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop challenged a university system built on philology, criticism, and the belief that “genius” could not be taught. By treating original stories and poems as legitimate thesis work, Iowa forced scholars to confront questions of academic rigor, grading, and the long-standing doctrine that creative writing belonged outside the classroom. The program’s compromise that writing itself may resist instruction while writers can be trained helped usher in what critics now call the “program era,” reshaping how American literature is made and where emerging authors learn their craft.

Contemporary trade publishing often views the graduate creative writing degree as a near default credential. Agents, editors, and prize juries routinely sift through manuscripts written by alumni of structured writers’ workshops, and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era has argued that postwar American fiction itself is inseparable from the rise of such programs. That environment has a surprisingly specific point of origin. When the University of Iowa formally established the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936, it became the first creative writing degree program in the United States and the prototype for the system that followed. It granted graduate credit for the writing of fiction and poetry themselves at a time when departments typically awarded credit for critical commentary on existing literature. The act of placing original creative work at the center of a curriculum, submitting it to faculty evaluation, and tying it to an advanced degree quietly shifted who could claim institutional recognition as a writer and how literary labor would be measured.

The roots of that shift reach back to 1922. That year, Graduate College dean Carl Seashore authorized Iowa students in the fine and performing arts to submit creative work in lieu of a traditional thesis, allowing collections of poems, musical compositions, or visual projects to stand in place of research dissertations that had once been required. The Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936 under Wilbur Schramm as a formal graduate program in fiction and poetry, transformed that policy from a permissive exception into an enduring institutional framework and became the earliest sustained program to grant advanced creative degrees in those disciplines. What appeared in the university record as an adjustment in procedure amounted to a redefinition of legitimate graduate work, one that elevated original artistic production to the status of scholarship and provided the template for hundreds of later MFA programs whose graduates now occupy the center of the contemporary literary field.

At midcentury, English departments in the United States were built around philology, literary history, and criticism, with the close study of language and canonical texts defining serious work. Graduate students demonstrated mastery by tracing sources, editing manuscripts, reconstructing historical contexts, and producing monographs on established authors; every step of that process could be footnoted, examined, and defended before a committee. New poems and stories written by living students did not fit easily into this machinery. To treat them as theses would collapse a boundary that protected the hierarchy of the field and the authority of scholars whose careers rested on interpretation. For senior faculty who had built reputations on editing texts and reconstructing traditions, the prospect of granting a degree for untested work on loose sheets of paper could look less like innovation and more like a dilution of standards.

That institutional caution drew strength from an older habit of thought, the idea of artistic genius as essentially unteachable. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, described genius as a natural talent that cannot explain its own procedures and that gives the rule to art instead of following a rule that can be set down, imitated, and examined. In that account, the most important part of creation is the moment that escapes method; technique can be codified and passed on, but the originating impulse that makes a work genuinely new arrives without instruction. Through Romantic aesthetics and nineteenth-century criticism, this picture of genius hardwired itself into lectures, essays, and conversations about literature, and by the time American universities were expanding in the early twentieth century, many scholars and writers still treated it as common sense.

When universities began to consider formal courses in creative writing, that assumption condensed into a convenient verdict that writing cannot be taught. Histories of creative writing pedagogy record that skepticism has shadowed the field from its earliest committees onward, with critics warning that programs would produce homogeneous assembly-line work or claim credit for gifts that belonged to the student alone. For professors trained in philology or criticism, the idea of awarding a master’s degree for a packet of poems or stories raised practical questions about evaluation, hiring, and funding; it appeared to treat an unpredictable, often private process as if it were equivalent to archival research or textual scholarship. Within that framework, a creative manuscript submitted for a graduate diploma could look like a category error, and any move toward institutional recognition of such work would have to contend with the fear that the university was trespassing into a domain that, by definition, exceeded formal instruction. Within a decade, however, several institutions would begin quietly testing that boundary and reshaping what counted as legitimate graduate work.

Even advocates of creative writing have often repeated softened versions of the same doubt. Iowa’s own public language has long walked that line. The Workshop’s philosophy page affirms that the program agrees in part with the claim that writing cannot be taught, while insisting that talent can be developed, and it likens the study of writing to learning the violin or painting, a discipline in which sustained training can sharpen ability without promising greatness. Later profiles quote administrators who stress that the success of Iowa graduates reflects what students brought with them more than what they received, even as the program demands intensive work and offers close instruction. The result is a carefully balanced message. Iowa denies that genius can be manufactured in a classroom while asserting that disciplined practice, guided reading, and exposure to demanding peers can change the trajectory of a writer’s work, a position that reassures skeptics without forfeiting the program’s claim to seriousness.

Practical objections followed the philosophical ones. Once a university grants credit for creative work, it must determine how that work will be evaluated within a system that promises clear, defensible standards. Committees have to decide what counts as a passing collection of stories and on what grounds a volume of poems fails to meet the bar for a degree. Faculty who sign a thesis report must explain how they weighed originality, voice, and narrative power in terms that will withstand internal review and external accreditation. Early commentary on creative writing as a discipline returns to these points. Critics worry that assessment will collapse into personal taste, that degrees will be awarded for charm or potential instead of demonstrable achievement, and that the presence of creative theses will weaken the perceived rigor of graduate study in departments that built their reputations on textual scholarship.

Iowa’s response was to present the Workshop as a place where writing would be treated with technical seriousness equal to any established graduate program in the humanities, while refusing to claim that inspiration itself could be produced on schedule. Histories of the program underline Wilbur Schramm’s conviction that writing should be as exacting and disciplined a pursuit as a traditional literature degree, and that the workshop format could make that discipline visible. Students were expected to produce new work regularly, circulate it in advance, and sit at a table while faculty and peers examined their pages line by line. The structure created accountability in several directions simultaneously, with firm deadlines, public discussion replacing private drafting, and revisions that responded to specific criticism. A student who arrived with weak or unfinished work could not disappear into the back row. That intensity asked a cost in exposure and pressure, yet it operated on a clear premise. A program could not guarantee brilliance, but writers with genuine potential would sharpen their work under sustained demands, close reading, and repeated cycles of critique and revision inside a cohort that treated their manuscripts with the same seriousness departments had once reserved for seminar papers.

Against that backdrop, the founding of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936 marked a structural break in how universities understood literary work. The program collapsed the long-standing separation between studying literature and contributing to it, treating original poems and stories as work that belonged within graduate education, and elevating what had once been regarded as an amateur pursuit, just outside the margins of campus life. It loosened the Romantic picture of genius as something entirely untouchable by instruction and argued that craft, structure, and reading habits could be strengthened through systematic practice. It also pulled questions of technique, audience, and aesthetic judgment into the formal life of the university, where committees, course requirements, and institutional hierarchies would begin to shape which voices were cultivated, which styles were rewarded, and which ambitions were treated as serious. What began as a local arrangement within one department altered who could claim institutional recognition as a writer and where literary authority would reside in the decades that followed.

In the years since, graduate writing programs have multiplied to the point that critics now speak of a program era in American fiction, with the workshop model serving as a primary route through which literary careers are trained, credentialed, and introduced to the market. Graduate study in creative writing appears routine in prize biographies, faculty listings, and publisher catalogs, while arguments about whether writing can be taught resurface whenever MFAs are discussed, yet proceed from the assumption that the workshop is a permanent feature of the landscape. That presumption of permanence is a central part of Iowa’s legacy. In 1936, granting a graduate degree for a manuscript of poems or stories required a university to conceive of creative practice as work that warranted credit, institutional time, and sustained critique, rather than as something that had to survive at the margins of academic life. Today, the consequences of that decision run through the pages of contemporary fiction and the careers of many of the writers who produce it, and any effort to understand how literature is made in this period must account for the institutional framework that the Iowa experiment helped to build.