Eric Bennett

During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university Book jacket.

Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War

Workshops of Empire

Awaiting a TV talk show appearance, John Townley is quaking with dread. He has published a best-selling memoir about the Iraq War, a page-turner climaxing in atrocity. In a green room beyond the soundstage, he braces himself to confront the charismatic soldier at the violent heart of it. But John has never actually seen the man before—nor served in Iraq, nor the military. Even so, and despite the deception, he knows his fabricated memoir contains stunning truths. By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Liepits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett's novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.

A Big Enough Lie

Poetry comes in many guises, it can be written as a profession, with the poetic correctness that complies, or by the everyday multitude who write about anything and everything, with no boundaries to contain their skills. Poetry is often used to convey thoughts and messages that might not be acceptable in other forms. For the many who write poems for the pleasure of self expression, it is often triggered by the desire to record situation or subject in verse, where it can be any combination of truth and fantasy, often bing left for the reader to interpret. My poems have been compiled over many years, yet are mostly ageless: flowers that bloom to greet us will bloom again next year. The attraction of putting a twist in the tale of a poem is always a temptation and a challenge, yet it can often turn sadness into laughter. Poetry is the choice of the reader... I do hope that you may enjoy my humble compositions. -- Eric Bennett

Eric Bennett

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