The summer week I received my doctorate, I visited a friend in Iowa City for four days. Iowa City is a singular Community in American life, perhaps the only place in the country where the literary and social promises described in the previous pages have taken root in the soil, the only place where literary ambition and the cult of authorial personality can be palpably viewed in the casual daily workings of urban life. It is, as a waiter in Chicago described to me, “the most literary little town” he had ever visited: “a Community of the imagination,” as Paul Engle called it in 1964.

Iowa City is, of course, home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the first and most prestigious graduate creative writing program. Since its founding between 1922 and 1939, the Workshop has grown rapidly into an American literary and publishing institution. Esquire has regularly listed Iowa as a “hot center” (or at least a significant planet) in its periodic maps of the “American literary universe” (itself another institution, and some future cultural historian's gold mine).