Iowa occupies a unique position in American letters—not because of its landscape or history, though both have inspired memorable fiction, but because it became, almost by accident, the center of American literary education. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in 1936, was the first creative writing degree program in the country. What began as an experiment became the model for hundreds of programs worldwide, and for nearly a century, the Workshop has drawn ambitious young writers to Iowa City, transforming this college town into a literary mecca.
The result is a state with two distinct literary traditions. First, there are the native Iowans who turned the prairie landscape—its small towns and struggling farms, its cycles of boom and bust, its particular loneliness and stubborn beauty—into literature of lasting power. Second, there are the writers who came to Iowa to study or teach, who found in the Workshop a community of peers and mentors that shaped their development. Both groups have produced Pulitzer winners, National Book Award recipients, and authors whose work defines contemporary American fiction.
This guide explores twenty-five essential authors connected to Iowa—some born in the cornfields, others drawn to them. Together, they represent why this heartland state has become synonymous with serious American writing.
Marilynne Robinson may be the most acclaimed fiction writer associated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she taught for over twenty-five years. Though born in Idaho, she made Iowa City her home and the imaginary Iowa town of Gilead the setting for a cycle of novels that have earned comparison to the greatest American literature. Her fiction combines theological depth with prose of luminous beauty, exploring faith, memory, and grace in ways that feel both timeless and urgently contemporary.
Her debut, "Housekeeping" (1980), follows two sisters raised by their eccentric aunt in the Pacific Northwest, establishing Robinson's gift for finding transcendence in ordinary lives. But it was "Gilead" (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize, that announced her as a major American voice. Written as an elderly Iowa minister's letter to his young son, the novel meditates on mortality, forgiveness, and the complex history of abolition on the prairie. Subsequent novels "Home," "Lila," and "Jack" expand this universe, creating a portrait of small-town Iowa as rich and morally complex as any in American fiction.
Bill Bryson has become one of the world's most beloved nonfiction writers, bringing humor and humanity to subjects ranging from travel to science to the English language. Born in Des Moines in 1951, he grew up during what he'd later mythologize as the golden age of American childhood—the 1950s Midwest of screen doors and fireflies, of Kool-Aid and lazy summers. His memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" (2006) celebrates this upbringing with characteristic warmth and wit.
Bryson left Iowa for England in his twenties and built his career explaining each country to the other. "Notes from a Small Island" affectionately chronicles British eccentricity, while "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" captures his bemusement upon returning to America. His travel narratives, including the beloved "A Walk in the Woods" about hiking the Appalachian Trail, combine self-deprecating humor with genuine curiosity about places and people. "A Short History of Nearly Everything" proved he could make science as entertaining as travel. Throughout, Bryson's Iowan sensibility—unpretentious, curious, fundamentally decent—shapes his voice.
Jane Smiley transformed the Iowa farm novel into King Lear. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who later taught there, she won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Thousand Acres" (1991), which reimagines Shakespeare's tragedy on a thousand-acre Iowa farm. The novel follows the Cook family as patriarch Larry decides to divide his land among his three daughters, setting in motion a catastrophe that exposes generations of secrets, including incest that Larry's dementia has allowed everyone to suppress.
Smiley's Iowa is no pastoral idyll—it's a landscape of industrial agriculture, toxic chemicals, and families bound by property rather than love. Her farmers struggle with debt and disaster, their lives shaped by forces they can barely understand let alone control. The brilliance of "A Thousand Acres" lies in giving voice to Goneril and Regan—Shakespeare's villainesses—and revealing them as survivors of abuse that the original play never imagined. Smiley has published prolifically in other settings, including the horse-racing trilogy beginning with "Horse Heaven," but her masterwork remains rooted in Iowa soil, transforming the family farm into a stage for American tragedy.
Flannery O'Connor was a Georgia writer to her bones, but her two years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1945-1947) proved formative. She arrived as a twenty-year-old with a thick Southern accent and stories unlike anything her classmates were writing—dark comedies of grace breaking into lives that wanted nothing to do with it. Her teacher Paul Engle recognized her genius immediately, even when he couldn't always understand what she was saying. At Iowa, O'Connor completed her first novel and developed the distinctive voice that would make her one of America's greatest short story writers.
"Wise Blood" (1952), begun at Iowa, follows Hazel Motes, a veteran who founds the Church Without Christ in a futile attempt to escape the Jesus who haunts him. Her story collections, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," contain some of the most startling fiction ever written—grandmother confronting murderer, farm wife receiving tattooed Christ. O'Connor's Workshop years gave her community and confidence; she returned to Georgia to raise peacocks and write stories that still shock readers with their violence and their strange, unsettling mercy.
Kurt Vonnegut came to Iowa in 1965 as a forty-three-year-old novelist whose career had stalled. He'd published several science fiction novels that hadn't found a mainstream audience, and he desperately needed income. Teaching at the Workshop gave him both a salary and a community that valued what he was trying to do. During his two years in Iowa City, Vonnegut worked on what would become his masterpiece, "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969).
That novel—part science fiction, part war memoir, part metafictional experiment—drew on Vonnegut's experience as a POW in Dresden during its firebombing. Its fractured chronology, its famous refrain "So it goes" after each death, its mixture of tragedy and absurdist humor, established Vonnegut as one of the essential American voices of the Vietnam era. At Iowa, he taught workshops with his characteristic mix of encouragement and irreverence, telling students that writing couldn't really be taught but that community mattered. His own breakthrough validated the Workshop's mission: serious literary art could emerge from genre traditions, given time and a supportive environment.
Robert James Waller wrote one of the bestselling novels of the 1990s, a book that became a cultural phenomenon and a Clint Eastwood film—all based on a simple premise: a married Iowa farm wife and a National Geographic photographer share four life-changing days while her husband is away. "The Bridges of Madison County" (1992) sold over fifty million copies worldwide, speaking to readers who found in Francesca and Robert's brief affair something they couldn't name but desperately wanted.
Born in Charles City, Iowa, in 1939, Waller was a business professor at the University of Northern Iowa before his literary success. Critics dismissed "Bridges" as sentimental, but its popular reception suggested it touched something genuine about longing, compromise, and roads not taken. The novel's Iowa setting—those covered bridges, those empty gravel roads, those farms where decades pass in quiet labor—becomes essential to its romance. Francesca, an Italian war bride marooned in the cornfields, represents everyone who wonders what their life might have been. Waller's subsequent books never matched this success, but "Bridges" remains a landmark of popular fiction.
Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the books that launched a million reading habits. Under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, she authored the first twenty-three Nancy Drew mysteries—and established the template for all that followed. Nancy's independence, intelligence, and adventurous spirit inspired generations of girls, and Benson created this character while still a student at the University of Iowa, where she became the first person to earn a master's degree in journalism.
Born in Ladora, Iowa, in 1905, Benson was a working writer at a time when that was unusual for women. She wrote at least 130 books under various pseudonyms while maintaining careers as a journalist and pilot. The Stratemeyer Syndicate, which owned the Nancy Drew franchise, paid her flat fees for manuscripts (between $125 and $250 each), denying her royalties on books that sold millions. For decades, her authorship was a trade secret. Only in 1980, during a lawsuit, was Benson publicly identified as the original Carolyn Keene. She continued working as a columnist for the Toledo Blade into her nineties, dying in 2002. Her creation, the teenage detective who could do anything, lives on.
T.C. Boyle has become one of America's most prolific and distinctive fiction writers, producing novels and story collections with a regularity that astonishes—and a quality that impresses. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1977 and his PhD in 1979, establishing the habits of discipline that have sustained his extraordinary output. His fiction combines satirical wit with genuine empathy, historical research with wild invention, creating work that entertains while it challenges.
His early novels like "World's End" (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award) and "The Tortilla Curtain" established his range—the first a multigenerational saga of the Hudson Valley, the second a sharp examination of immigration and class in contemporary California. Later historical novels like "The Road to Wellville" (about John Harvey Kellogg) and "The Women" (about Frank Lloyd Wright's romantic life) show his gift for finding absurdity and pathos in real lives. Boyle's short stories, collected in multiple volumes, demonstrate his mastery of that form. He teaches at USC, having long ago left Iowa—but the discipline and ambition fostered there shapes every book.
Hamlin Garland was among the first American writers to depict Midwestern farm life without sentimentality—and the response taught him how deeply invested readers were in pastoral illusions. Born in Wisconsin in 1860 but raised partly in Iowa (his family moved constantly, chasing better land), Garland knew firsthand the grueling labor, the isolation, the dreams that withered under prairie sun. His story collection "Main-Travelled Roads" (1891) shocked readers with its frank depiction of farm life's hardships.
These stories—farmers broken by debt, wives aged beyond their years, young people desperate to escape—drew from Garland's own observation. He called his approach "veritism," a commitment to depicting rural life as it actually was rather than as urban readers wanted to imagine it. The stories were controversial; some accused Garland of betraying the heartland. But they opened a tradition of Midwestern realism that writers from Willa Cather to Jane Smiley would continue. Garland eventually softened, writing nostalgic memoirs like "A Son of the Middle Border" that celebrated pioneer life. But his early fiction remains essential for anyone wanting to understand the darker currents beneath the amber waves of grain.
Bess Streeter Aldrich wrote bestselling novels about pioneer women that millions of readers embraced as authentic portraits of their grandmothers' generation. Born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1881, she trained as a teacher before turning to fiction, publishing stories in popular magazines while raising four children after her husband's early death. Her novels, including "A Lantern in Her Hand" (1928) and "A White Bird Flying" (1931), followed pioneer families across generations, celebrating their endurance and sacrifice.
"A Lantern in Her Hand" became her most beloved work, telling the story of Abbie Deal from her girlhood journey west through decades of homesteading, child-raising, and quiet heroism. The novel was assigned in schools across the Midwest, shaping how generations understood pioneer women's experience. Critics sometimes dismissed Aldrich as sentimental, but her popularity suggested she captured something genuine about how Midwesterners understood their past. Her Cedar Falls birthplace is preserved as a museum, and her books remain in print, offering a counterpoint to Garland's darker vision—pioneer life as noble struggle rather than grinding defeat.
Max Allan Collins has built an extraordinary career writing crime fiction, graphic novels, movie novelizations, and historical mysteries—all while remaining rooted in his native Iowa. Born in Muscatine in 1948, he graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and chose to stay in the Midwest rather than decamp to a coast. His graphic novel "Road to Perdition" became an Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks; his Nathan Heller detective series explores real historical crimes with meticulous research and pulp energy.
Collins has also written more than a hundred novels, including numerous movie tie-ins and continuations of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series (at Spillane's request). He's completed manuscripts left unfinished by Spillane and other deceased writers. This prolific output might suggest hackwork, but Collins brings genuine craft to genre fiction, understanding that entertainment and quality aren't opposed. His loyalty to Iowa—he still lives in Muscatine—represents a path not often chosen by successful writers: you can stay home and build a career. His work proves that serious crime fiction can emerge from the heartland.
Ethan Canin writes about ambition, family, and moral compromise with the precision of someone who's thought deeply about what drives accomplished people—and what it costs them. He's been associated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop for decades, first as a student, then as one of its most distinguished faculty members. His fiction often focuses on the American meritocracy: doctors, politicians, scientists, and the families who orbit them.
His novel "America America" follows a working-class boy who becomes involved with a wealthy political family, exploring the seductions and corruptions of power. "A Doubter's Almanac" traces a brilliant mathematician's life from early genius through decline, examining how exceptional ability shapes—and damages—those who possess it. Canin's short story collections, including "Emperor of the Air" and "The Palace Thief," contain some of the most admired contemporary short fiction. As a teacher, he's shaped generations of Workshop students; as a writer, he's created fiction that explores the costs of striving with unflinching honesty.
James Hearst was Iowa's farmer-poet, a man who worked his family's land near Cedar Falls while producing verse that captured the physical and spiritual dimensions of agricultural life. Born in 1900, he was paralyzed in a diving accident at seventeen but refused to be defined by disability, learning to work from a wheelchair and eventually becoming the state's poet laureate. His poetry earned praise from Robert Frost, who became a friend and correspondent.
Hearst's poems take farming seriously as both labor and metaphor. He writes about plowing and planting, about seasons and weather, about the particular loneliness of rural life—but also about how working the land connects humans to larger cycles of death and renewal. He taught at the University of Northern Iowa for decades, influencing generations of Iowa writers. His collected poems and memoir "My Shadow Below Me" document a life rooted in place, proving that significant poetry could emerge from daily labor rather than merely commenting on it. Hearst died in 1983, having never left the region that sustained his art.
Jo Ann Beard writes essays and fiction that blur the boundaries between memoir and journalism, crafting narratives of such precision and emotional power that they've become touchstones for creative nonfiction. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and worked at the university before becoming a freelance writer. Her essay "The Fourth State of Matter," published in The New Yorker, recounted the 1991 mass shooting at the University of Iowa from the perspective of someone who lost friends—and it became one of the most acclaimed essays of its era.
Her collection "The Boys of My Youth" demonstrated her range, moving from childhood memoir to narrative journalism to pieces that resist easy categorization. The title essay captures adolescent friendship and rivalry with novelistic detail; other pieces explore her parents' marriage, her own romantic disasters, and the wildlife that wanders into her life. Beard teaches at Sarah Lawrence, having left Iowa, but her writing remains connected to Midwestern themes: family, community, the persistence of the past. Her recent novel "Festival Days" continues her exploration of how we construct meaning from experience.
Wallace Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, in 1909—though his restless family soon moved on, as they would throughout his childhood, chasing opportunity across the West. That rootlessness, that longing for home, would shape his fiction and nonfiction alike. Stegner became one of America's most honored Western writers, winning the Pulitzer Prize for "Angle of Repose" and the National Book Award for "The Spectator Bird." He founded the creative writing program at Stanford that rivaled Iowa's Workshop.
Though Stegner left Iowa as an infant and is associated with the West, his birth there connects him to themes of migration and displacement that run through American literature. His memoir "Wolf Willow" explores childhood on the Saskatchewan frontier; his novels examine how Americans have treated the Western landscape and each other. "Crossing to Safety" is often called the finest American novel of friendship. Stegner's environmental advocacy—he helped preserve wilderness areas and opposed destructive development—emerged from his understanding of how rootlessness damages both land and people. Iowa gave him his first few months of life; the West gave him everything else.
W. P. Kinsella, a Canadian writer, created the most famous Iowa novel by an outsider—a book that transformed a cornfield into a site of American pilgrimage. "Shoeless Joe" (1982) follows Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who hears a voice instructing him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. "If you build it, he will come." What follows is a magical realist fable about fathers and sons, about baseball as redemption, about the American need for second chances.
The novel became the film "Field of Dreams" (1989), starring Kevin Costner, which in turn made Dyersville, Iowa—where the movie was shot—a tourist destination. Visitors still come to play catch on the diamond. Kinsella, who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, understood that Iowa's corn symbolized both abundance and limitation: the farm that could become magical, the heartland where miracles might still occur. His other baseball fiction, including stories about Native Americans and the game, explores similar themes of transcendence. But "Shoeless Joe" remains his legacy—a book that gave Iowa a myth of its own.
Vicki Myron's "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World" (2008) became an unlikely international bestseller—a memoir centered on a cat found frozen in a library book drop who became the beloved mascot of Spencer, Iowa. The book's success puzzled literary critics but not the millions of readers who found in Dewey's story something they needed: a tale of community, resilience, and the comfort that animals provide.
Myron served as director of the Spencer Public Library for twenty-five years, and her book is as much about small-town Iowa as about its feline hero. Spencer was struggling when Dewey arrived in 1988—the farm crisis had devastated the region, and residents needed something to believe in. A ginger kitten who survived subzero temperatures in a book drop became that symbol. Myron's memoir traces Dewey's nineteen years at the library, but it also chronicles her own struggles with alcoholism, divorce, and economic hardship. The book's success demonstrated that stories of heartland resilience still resonated with readers worldwide.
Herbert Quick wrote one of the most ambitious novel trilogies about Iowa's settlement—books now largely forgotten but historically significant for their attempt to capture the pioneer experience on an epic scale. Born in Grundy County in 1861, Quick worked as a teacher, lawyer, mayor, and magazine editor before turning to fiction in middle age. His "Hawkeye" trilogy—"Vandemark's Folly" (1922), "The Hawkeye" (1923), and "The Invisible Woman" (1924)—traces Iowa from pioneer settlement through early statehood.
"Vandemark's Folly" follows Jacob Vandemark from his orphaned childhood on the Erie Canal to his establishment of an Iowa homestead, capturing the work of breaking prairie, building community, and surviving the uncertainties of frontier life. Quick's prose can be stiff, but his research was extensive, and the novels preserve details of pioneer experience that might otherwise be lost. His nonfiction, including "One Man's Life" (his autobiography) and various works on agricultural policy, established him as an interpreter of Midwestern life. Though his fiction no longer finds readers, Quick represents a tradition of Iowans documenting their own history.
Ruth Suckow was once considered the most important novelist of Iowa life—praised by H. L. Mencken, compared to Willa Cather, translated into multiple languages. Born in Hawarden in 1892, she depicted small-town Iowa with meticulous realism, capturing the limited horizons and quiet frustrations of ordinary people who never appeared in sensational narratives. Her reputation faded after her death in 1960, but scholars have rediscovered her work as essential documentation of Midwestern experience.
Her novels, including "The Folks" (1934) and "Country People" (1924), focus on families navigating economic change and generational conflict. "The Folks" spans four decades in the life of the Ferguson family, from comfortable small-town prosperity through Depression-era struggle. Suckow's style is deliberately unglamorous—she believed that honest depiction of ordinary life was more valuable than drama or symbolism. Her short stories, collected in "Iowa Interiors," demonstrate similar commitments. Though her work now appears dated, it preserves a moment in Iowa history with fidelity that more popular writers often sacrificed for entertainment.
Donald Harstad spent twenty-six years as a deputy sheriff in Clayton County, Iowa—and then used that experience to write police procedurals that capture law enforcement in rural America with unmatched authenticity. His novels feature Carl Houseman, a deputy in the fictional Nation County, who investigates crimes ranging from drug dealing to homicide in a landscape of bluffs, farms, and Mississippi River towns. Harstad's Midwest is no pastoral retreat: it's a place where methamphetamine has devastated communities and violence erupts with shocking suddenness.
His debut, "Eleven Days" (1998), follows an investigation into a farmhouse massacre that reveals connections to a dangerous drug network. Subsequent novels explore Midwestern crime with attention to procedure, geography, and the particular challenges of policing rural areas where backup might be an hour away. Harstad knows his territory—the weather, the roads, the way word spreads in small communities—and his plots reflect real changes in rural crime. His work offers a necessary corrective to the assumption that serious crime fiction must be urban; the heartland has its own darkness.
John Irving attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and later returned to teach there—experiences he credits with shaping his understanding of craft. Born in New Hampshire in 1942, Irving became one of America's most popular serious novelists, writing bestsellers that combined literary ambition with storytelling that general readers could embrace. His Iowa years gave him both discipline and community, teaching him that writing was work to be approached with rigor.
"The World According to Garp" (1978) established Irving as a major voice—a novel about a writer, his feminist mother, his family, that somehow encompassed wrestling, assassination, and the nature of fiction itself. Subsequent novels like "The Cider House Rules," "A Prayer for Owen Meany," and "A Widow for One Year" continued his exploration of families, artists, and American experience. Irving's novels are long, intricate, full of coincidence and fate—they're not minimalist Iowa School fiction, yet the Workshop's emphasis on craft shapes every page. He represents the Workshop's range: serious literary fiction that millions of people actually want to read.
Sandra Cisneros came to the Iowa Writers' Workshop from Chicago's Mexican-American community and found herself alienated from a program that seemed designed for different lives and different stories. That alienation proved productive: it pushed her to find her own voice, to write about the working-class Latina experience that mainstream American literature had largely ignored. "The House on Mango Street" (1984) emerged from that determination.
The novel—or linked story collection—follows Esperanza Cordero growing up in a Chicago barrio, dreaming of a house of her own, a space where she can write and be herself. Cisneros's prose is lyrical and compressed, each vignette a poem in disguise. The book became a classroom staple, introducing countless students to Latina experience and to prose that defied genre categories. Cisneros has spoken honestly about feeling marginalized at Iowa—about the class and cultural assumptions embedded in the Workshop's aesthetic. Yet her breakthrough emerged from that friction, proving that the program could nurture voices it might not have anticipated.
Denis Johnson was one of the most original and unsettling American writers of his generation, producing fiction and poetry that explored addiction, violence, and grace with hallucinatory intensity. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1970s, studying alongside other future luminaries, and his work bears the Iowa influence even as it transcends any school or movement. His prose achieves an almost visionary quality, finding transcendence in the margins of American life.
His story collection "Jesus' Son" (1992) follows an unnamed narrator through heroin addiction, petty crime, and moments of strange beauty in the American Midwest. The book became a cult classic, its compressed stories achieving effects that longer novels rarely manage. His novel "Tree of Smoke" (2007), about the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award. Johnson, who died in 2017, wrote about characters most literature ignores—addicts, drifters, the damaged—with a seriousness that insisted on their full humanity. His Iowa connection is brief but genuine; his influence on American fiction is lasting.
Jorie Graham has been called the most influential American poet of her generation, and she spent fifteen years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, first as a student and then as faculty, before moving to Harvard. Her poetry pushes at the boundaries of what verse can do, combining philosophical inquiry with sensory precision, exploring perception, time, and humanity's relationship to the natural world. She won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Dream of the Unified Field" (1996).
Graham's poems are challenging—long, discursive, full of questions and hesitations—yet they achieve a hypnotic power that rewards patient reading. She writes about looking at paintings, about rivers and history, about the climate crisis and what it means for human consciousness. At Iowa, she trained generations of poets, emphasizing ambition and risk. Her own work demonstrates those values: she's never repeated herself, always pushing into new territory. Graham represents the Workshop at its most serious, producing work that demands engagement rather than offering easy pleasures.
Mildred Armstrong Kalish waited until she was eighty-seven to publish her first book—and "Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression" (2007) became an immediate bestseller. The memoir describes her childhood on her grandparents' farm in Garrison, Iowa, during the 1930s, when her mother moved the family there after her father's disappearance. Kalish writes about poverty with surprising joy, celebrating the skills, pleasures, and community that sustained her family.
The book's success reflected nostalgia for a vanished America, but Kalish's voice prevented mere sentimentality. She writes about slaughtering chickens and stretching every ingredient, about the creativity required by scarcity and the dignity her grandparents maintained despite hardship. Recipes appear alongside recollections; practical skills are documented alongside emotional memories. Kalish, who became a college English professor, brought a scholar's precision to memoir. "Little Heathens" preserves a way of life that has almost entirely disappeared, told by someone who lived it with open eyes and a grateful heart.
Iowa's literary tradition reflects the Workshop's extraordinary impact—but it also reflects the enduring human need to document and transform ordinary experience. The farm novels of Garland and Suckow, the pioneer sagas of Aldrich and Quick, the contemporary realism of Smiley and Robinson: all grapple with what it means to live in the heartland, to work the land, to build communities in apparent isolation. Iowa isn't exotic, and that's precisely the point. Its writers prove that literature doesn't require spectacular settings—it requires attention to what's actually there.
The Workshop itself has evolved considerably since its founding, becoming more diverse in faculty and students, more conscious of the limitations of its historical aesthetic. But its core insight remains vital: writing is a craft that can be taught, and writers need community. The thousands of authors who've passed through Iowa City—studying, teaching, workshopping manuscripts in the Dey House—have shaped American literature in ways that can't be fully measured. When you read contemporary American fiction, you're probably reading someone who studied at Iowa, or studied with someone who did.
From the cornfields to the classroom, Iowa has produced and nurtured writers who've won every major prize and reached every kind of reader. These twenty-five authors represent only a fraction of the state's literary legacy. They share a commitment to craft, a willingness to take ordinary lives seriously, and an understanding that the Midwest—so often dismissed as flyover country—contains stories as rich and complex as any on earth.
