25. Stevens, xi.
26. Lisa Durose, “Marilynne Robinson: A Bibliography,” American Notes and Queries 10.1 (Winter 1997): 31–46.
27. “Writers’ Workshop Professor Wins $250,000 Prize,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 5 February 1998, RIWW SCUI.
28. Mason.
29. Gigi Wood, “Local Author in National Spotlight,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 20 November 2004, web.
30. Bob Abernethy, “Marilynne Robinson, Extended Interview,” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, 18 September 2009, web.
31. For an excellent example of her holograph manuscripts, see pinterest.com, https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c7/2a/45/c72a45fcc1e6aff26b6a35f8a60fc3c3.jpg.
32. Emily Bobrow, “Meeting Marilynne Robinson,” Economist, 21 May 2011, web.
33. Mason.
34. Marilynne Robinson, “By the Book,” New York Times, 7 March 2013, web.
35. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 133–134.
36. Jane Mulkerrins, “Marilynne Robinson: The Pulitzer Prize Winning Author on Her New Book,” Telegraph, 18 October 2014, web.
37. For more on the social commentary describing “intense interior lives” in Robinson’s fiction, especially about the “transition from domesticity to indigence,” see Maggie Galehouse, “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 117–137.
38. Mason.
39. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959), 30.
40. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 7.
41. Stevens, xi.
42. Robinson, Gilead, 19.
43. For more on Emerson’s appreciation of Humboldt and the astronomer’s adoption by New England transcendentalist intellectuals, see Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
44. Abernethy.
45. Abernethy.
46. Mason.
47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972), 1:10.
48. David Dowling, Emerson’s Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 20, 255.
49. Robinson, Gilead, 246.
50. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 329.
51. Robinson, Gilead, 246.
52. Robinson, Gilead, 247.
53. Mason.
54. Abernethy.
55. Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
56. Abernethy.
57. “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa,” New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015, 6.
58. Marilynne Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities: In Defense of America’s Best Idea,” Harper’s, March 2016, 30; Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Marilynne Robinson to Lecture on Crisis in Higher Education,” Des Moines Register, 16 November 2016, web.
59. Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Graduate Employee Union Rips UI President Choice,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 4 September 2015, web.
60. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 37.
61. Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 3–4.
62. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 37.
63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 93.
64. Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” 30.
65. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 92.
66. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 84.
67. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 99.
68. Fay, 38.
69. Meghan O’Rourke, “A Moralist of the Midwest,” New York Times Magazine, 24 October 2004, web.
70. O’Rourke.
71. Thessaly Le Force, “A Teacher and Her Student,” Vice, 18 June 2013, web.
72. Le Force.
73. Marilynne Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 157.
74. Julia Shriver, “Robinson to Receive Award,” Daily Iowan, 10 July 2013, RIWW SCUI.
75. Le Force.
76. Dowling, 86.
77. Lee, “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.”
78. Robinson, “Fear,” New York Review of Books, 24 September 2014, web.
79. Fay, 39.
80. Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” 159.
81. Robinson, “By the Book.”
82. Robinson, “Diminished Creatures,” 159.
14. The Warrior: Anthony Swofford
1. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003), 70; Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die,” in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, ed. Dianne Wood Middlebrook (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 98.
2. Swofford, Jarhead, 71.
3. Swofford, Jarhead, 71.
4. Anthony Swofford, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir (New York: Hachette, 2012), 204.
5. Swofford, Hotels, 234.
6. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Interview with Anthony Swofford: Unscrewing Jarhead,” Combustible Celluloid, 24 October 2004, web.
7. Anderson.
8. Swofford, Jarhead, 1.
9. Swofford, Jarhead, 1.
10. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
11. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 3.
12. Jon Robert Adams, Male Armor: The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 124.
13. Swofford, Jarhead, 11, 254.
14. Anthony Swofford, “Foreword,” in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, ed. Gerald Nicosia (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), xxi–xxiii.
15. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Random House, 2013 [1929]), 32.
16. Lyne Gabriel, “A Soldier from a Familiar Part of Town,” Daily Iowan, 29 January 2004, p. 4C.
17. Swofford, Jarhead, 10, 11.
18. Nathaniel Fick, “How Accurate Is Jarhead? What One Marine Makes of the Gulf War Movie,” Slate, 9 November 2005, web.
19. Anthony Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” MFA thesis, University of Iowa, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, May 2001, iii.
20. Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes, Universal Pictures, 2005, DVD, supplementary material.
21. Swofford, Jarhead, 247.
22. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1982), 54.
23. Swofford, Jarhead, dust jacket.
24. William T. Vollmann, “Military Brats in Love,” New York Times Book Review, 14 January 2007, web.
25. As quoted in Fick.
26. Vollman.
27. Swofford, Jarhead, 34, 36.
28. Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, “Gulf War Memoir Syndrome,” Texas Observer, 12 September 2003, web.
29. Adams, 116.
30. Mark Bowden, “The Things They Carried,” New York Times, 2 March 2003, web.
31. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: A Warrior Haunted by Ghosts of Battle,” New York Times, 19 February 2003, web.
32. Matt Schudel, “Frank Conroy; Author and Iowa Writers’ Workshop Director,” Washington Post, 7 April 2005, web.
33. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
34. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
35. William L. Hamilton, “At Home with Chris Offutt: Learning Not to Trespass on the Gently Rolling Past,” New York Times, 18 April 2002, web.
36. Chris Offutt, “My Dad, the Po
rnographer,” New York Times Magazine, 5 February 2015, web.
37. Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” 32.
38. Swofford, “Escape and Evasion (Stories),” 56–57.
39. “Interview with Anthony Swofford,” Iowa Review, April 2015, web.
40. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 6 April 2016, email.
41. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
42. Stephen Bloom, “He Was Tough and Generous,” Chicago Tribune, 10 April 2005, Sect. 2, pp. 1–4.
43. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
44. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 7 April 2016, email.
45. Stephen Elliott, “Interview with Anthony Swofford,” Believer, February 2007, web.
46. Reza Aslan, “Reza Aslan Reading, Live from Prairie Lights,” 7 April 2005, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, Iowa Digital Library.
47. Frank Conroy to Pinckney Benedict, 25 May 1988, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
48. James Michener to Frank Conroy, 26 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
49. Frank Conroy to Erik Nelson, 22 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
50. James Michener to Frank Conroy, 26 September 1989, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
51. Paul Sorenson, “Stuck in the Desert of Romance,” Daily Iowan, 24 January 2007, 7A.
52. Anthony Swofford, interview with David Dowling, 6 April 2016, email.
53. In collaboration with director Sam Mendes, Swofford narrated and co-produced Semper Fi and Jarhead Diaries, documentary material bundled with the DVD of Jarhead released in 2005. Jarhead Diaries focuses on the making of the film, and Semper Fi was designed to acknowledge and respect the American troops who were still on the front lines of battle in Iraq. It profiles the homecoming experience of several Marine combatants. Swofford was a co-presenter and fellow memoirist with his wife Christa Parravani at several events in and around New York City. “Book Launch: Her by Christa Parravani with Anthony Swofford,” The Powerhouse Arena, 5 March 2013.
54. Swofford, Hotels, i.
15. The Voice: Ayana Mathis and Mass Culture
1. Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005), 118; David Pesci, “The Oprah Effect: Texts, Readers, and the Dialectic of Signification,” Communications Review 5.2 (2002): 143–178.
2. Hardy Green, “Why Oprah Opens Readers’ Wallets,” Business Week, 9 October 2005, web.
3. David Daley, “Ayana Mathis: Oprah Winfrey Is on the Phone and a Career Is Born,” Salon, 16 December 2012, web.
4. Patricia Sellers, “The Business of Being Oprah,” Fortune, 1 April 2002, web.
5. Daley.
6. Daley.
7. Jonathan Lee, “A Question of Faith,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, 15 May 2013, web.
8. Daley.
9. Matthew Salesses, “When Defending Your Writing Becomes Defending Yourself,” NPR: Code Switch, Frontiers of Race, Culture, and Identity, 20 July 2014, web.
10. Lynn Neary, “In Elite MFA Programs, the Challenge of Writing While ‘Other,’ ” NPR: Code Switch, Frontiers of Race, Culture, and Identity, 19 August 2014, web.
11. Sheryl McCarthy, “One to One: Ayana Mathis, Author, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” CUNYtv, 22 January 2013, web video.
12. McCarthy.
13. Daley.
14. McCarthy.
15. Julie Mannell, “University of Iowa Fail,” Community on BuzzFeed, 24 March 2015, web.
16. Minnesota’s Mayo Medical School, the educational counterpart of the Mayo Medical Clinic, had a 2.1 percent acceptance rate in 2018; Alyssa Rege, “10 Medical Schools with the Lowest Acceptance Rates,” Becker’s Medical Review, 3 April 2018, web. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s admission of 25 students out of 1,026 applicants for fall 2015 yielded an acceptance rate of 2.4 percent. Yale Law School’s acceptance rate was 8.4 percent in 2017.
17. Neary.
18. Neena Andrews, “Oprah Talks to Ayana Mathis,” O, The Oprah Magazine, South Africa, March 2013, web.
19. Daley.
20. Daley.
21. Daley.
22. Ayana Mathis, “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” [excerpt], MFA thesis, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2011, 18–20.
23. Mathis, “Twelve Tribes,” 21.
24. Mathis, “Twelve Tribes,” 22.
25. Werner Huber et al., Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Wiesbaden, Germany: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2005).
26. Ayana Mathis, “What Will Happen to All of That Beauty,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, 15 December 2014, web.
27. Oprah Winfrey and Ayana Mathis, “Exclusive Webisode: Author Ayana Mathis’ Three Greatest Lessons,” Oprah.com, February 2013, web.
28. Winfrey and Mathis, “Three Greatest Lessons.”
29. Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (New York: Knopf, 2012).
30. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 131, 135.
31. Christopher Clair, “ ‘It Still Doesn’t Quite Seem Real’: Writers’ Workshop Alumna Mathis Experiencing Post-Oprah Whirlwind,” Iowa Now, 1 February 2013, web.
32. Dan Barden, “Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes,” Poets and Writers (March/April 2008), 87.
33. As quoted in Michael Parks, “On the Write Track: A University of Arkansas Program Has Trained Students in the Nuts and Bolts of Producing Good Fiction and Poetry for 40 Years,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 3 April 2008, E6.
34. Torres’s own fame, driven mainly by his memoir, is immediately visible in mass culture in Salon’s selection of him among the sexiest men of 2011, the year he graduated from the Workshop. “Salon’s Sexiest Men of 2011,” Salon, 17 November 2011, web.
35. Ramin Setoodeh, “ ‘Girls’ Finale: Director of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Weighs In,” Variety, 24 March 2014, web.
36. Daley.
37. McGurl, 301.
38. Anis Shivani, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2011), 170.
39. McGurl, 301.
40. Shivani, 172.
41. McGurl, 229.
42. Clair.
43. Siddhartha Deb and Ayana Mathis, “Why Get an MFA?” New York Times, 18 August 2015, web.
44. Shivani, 153–155.
45. Junot Díaz, “MFA vs. POC,” New Yorker, 30 April 2014, 32.
46. Deb and Mathis.
47. Neary.
48. Anthony Swofford, interview by David Dowling, 24 May 2016.
49. Deb and Mathis.
50. Shivani, 172.
51. Daley.
52. E. I. Johnson, “Famous Literary Agent: Ellen Levine,” The View from the Top: Interviews with Industry Experts, 7 June 2007, web.
53. Jeff Charis-Carlson and Zach Berg, “Marilynne Robinson Retiring from Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 27 April 2016, web.
54. McCarthy.
55. Mathis, Twelve Tribes, 9.
56. Nicole Mowbray, “Oprah’s Path to Power,” Guardian, 3 March 2003, web.
57. Andrews.
58. Neary.
59. McCarthy.
60. R. Jackson Wilson, “Emerson as Lecturer: Man Thinking, Man Saying,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79.
61. Shivani, 170; also see McGurl on professionalism in MFA programs, 55, 95, 409.
62. Lee.
63. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N
.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 105.
64. Lee.
65. Lee.
66. Craig L. Garthwaite, You Get a Book! Demand Spillovers, Combative Advertising, and Celebrity Endorsements, National Bureau of Economic Research, no. w17915, 2012.
67. Collins, 105.
68. Kisha, “African-American Historical Fiction Discussion: Ayana Mathis’s ‘Twelve Tribes of Hattie,’ ” Goodreads, 19 March 2014, 10:39 A.M., web.
69. Felicia R. Lee, “Novelist’s Debut Is Newest Pick for Oprah’s Book Club,” New York Times, 5 December 2012, web.
70. Nicole Nichols and Wendy Luckenbill, “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Announces Its Second Selection, ‘The Twelve Tribes of Hattie’ by Ayana Mathis,” Discovery Press Web, 5 December 2012, web.
71. Shivani, 290.
72. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 219.
73. Shivani, 290.
74. Jason Boog, “Top 10 Bestselling Books in Oprah’s Book Club,” GalleyCat, 23 May 2011, web.
75. Mathis did not comment in response to my questions as to whether she would actively pursue a mass audience such as Oprah’s Book Club readers again with her next project. Ayana Mathis, correspondence with David Dowling, 30 April 2016.
76. Olsen and Schaeffer, 294.
77. Olsen and Schaeffer, 185.
78. Hector Tobar, “Melodrama Overtakes Mathis’ ‘Twelve Tribes of Hattie,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2012, web.
79. Garthwaite, 60.
80. Communications scholar Janice Radway explains how participation in book clubs can function as “narrative therapy,” especially through immersion in story worlds that leave the reader “earless, eyeless, motionless for hours.” Such deep reading provides “the cure of interlocking dreams” to counter anxiety, fear, and loneliness. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 15. For more on the culture and gender politics of audience in popular literature, see Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
81. Lee.
82. Collins, 103.
83. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 142.
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