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CREATIVE WRITING: EILIS NI DHUIBHNEreviews The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingBy Mark McGurl Harvard University Press, 455pp. $35

CREATIVE WRITING has been taught as a subject in universities in the United States for almost 100 years. The most famous programme, the MFA (Master’s in Fine Arts) at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, started in 1936. It was in the period immediately after the second World War, however, that the subject began to take off. By 1975, 52 universities offered postgraduate degrees in Creative Writing. In 2004, there were more than 300 such courses on offer in the United States, and over 700 universities teaching creative writing at undergraduate level. And still people ask “Can it be taught?”