Paul Engle; Poet, Leader of Iowa Writers Workshop

Paul Engle, the prairie poet and guiding genius of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the 55-year-old graduate school program that brought the small farm community of Iowa City acclamation as the “Athens of America,” has died.

Engle, who gathered such literary luminaries as Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, James Michener, Robert Penn Warren and Raymond Carver at the University of Iowa to teach and write, was 82.

The Associated Press reported that Engle had just embarked on a tour to visit the writing program’s overseas graduates when he collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Friday.

Editor and writer of more than 20 books of poetry, essays, fiction and literary criticism, Engle joined the Iowa faculty in 1937 and began, as he said in a 1986 interview with The Times, to “recruit writing talent the way football coaches recruit quarterbacks.”

The university became a gathering spot for literary talent 1,000 miles west of the publishing houses in New York.

In Iowa, O’Connor wrote “Wise Blood” and Tennessee Williams earned a D+ in drama. Philip Roth wrote “Letting Go” and John Irving fashioned his best-selling “The World According to Garp” there.

John Bly won the 1968 National Book Award, 30 years after graduating from the workshop, the nation’s first and, many say, best program to award graduate degrees for creative writing.

Engle established seminars that draw together well-known writers who meet with novices whose work is critiqued. Students are carefully screened before admittance--only 1 in 10 applicants are accepted--and are expected to spend two years working on a novel or a collection of stories or poems.

After two years most are found wanting and advised to find other careers.

Other schools around the country have copied the format of the Iowa workshop, said Marvin Bell, a professor in the workshop since 1965 who was a student of Engle’s from 1961 to 1963.

In 1967, Engle and his wife, Chinese novelist Hua-ling Nieh, founded the university’s International Writing Program, which has attracted 800 writers from 81 countries and earned them a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.

A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Engle earned graduate degrees from the University of Iowa, Columbia University and Merton College in Oxford, England, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

By then he was an established poet, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize with his groundbreaking first manuscript, “Worn Earth” in 1932. University of Iowa made the manuscript the first book of poems in the country accepted as a thesis for a master of fine arts degree.

In his personal critiques, Engle tried never to distinguish between the students and famous authors he attracted.

“We were all in this awful writing business together.”