A Lucky American Childhood (Singular Lives)

The legacy of poet Paul Engle, who died in 1991, includes the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which he helped found in 1967, and the memoir A Lucky American Childhood. Engle grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during the 1920s on a hardscrabble farm where his family struggled to make ends meet. Not necessarily the normal training ground for a poet and educator, but Engle finds in his childhood the raw materials that shaped him not only as a poet but as a person as well.