Abstract
The checklist which follows outlines the publishing career of a man who has been near the center of the American literary landscape— as poet, teacher, and editor—for more than thirty years. His publica tions as listed* actually cover forty-one years. The work of the first ten years, however, reflects for the most part a chrysalis time of seeking a style. It was then, from the late twenties to the mid-thirties, that the intensely romantic, brilliant boy from Coe College emerged as a poet and went on to his state university to earn one of the first graduate degrees in creative writing ever given. After that, in 1932, his Iowa master’s thesis was selected as a volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In the meantime he had moved on for further study, first at Columbia University, and then at Oxford on a Rhodes Schol arship. Paul Engle’s emergence as a national literary phenomenon, however, can be dated from 1934, the year his first commercially published book of poetry, American Song, appeared. Stephen Vincent Benet said kind words about it, J. Donald Adams reviewed it enthusiastically on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Herald Tribune listed it for some weeks as a best seller. Engle once told me that he was in Switzerland when first news of the book’s success reached him. He became a young man on two mountaintops, the figurative one much more important than the literal one, and just as beautiful. After returning to Iowa, he became a teacher in The University of Iowa writing program and in 1942 was appointed director of the pro gram, in which capacity he has continued until the present year. He has become famous for his ability to attract promising young writers, just
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