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In 1964, two years after the publication of his debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey left California on a cross-country road trip. He took recording equipment, hallucinogenic drugs, and a dozen friends. Kesey drove east in part to escape the loneliness of novel writing, but he was also putting both physical and symbolic space between himself and the creative writing program at Stanford, from which he had graduated in 1962. He took his education with him, though: the Merry Pranksters drove a school bus.

There is a provocative irony in the fact that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—one of the twentieth century’s loudest anti-institutional novels—was written for class credit. That irony, Mark McGurl writes in his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, lies at the heart of the last half-century of American fiction.

McGurl’s argument that the advent of creative writing “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history” is an important one, and it is going to be controversial. The first graduate-level creative writing program began in 1936, and there are now more than three-hundred of them scattered throughout the country, with four hundred additional degrees offered to undergraduates. Admissions are competitive; as McGurl writes, students love creative writing “suspiciously much.” The estimated success rate for creative writing graduates—that is, how many actually go on to write for a living—is roughly one percent. (It is ninety percent for medical school graduates.) Each year, thousands of students voluntarily put themselves in debt for what amounts to a slightly modified extension of their college education. It is hard to imagine what the country’s literature would look like without it.

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Anyone can write alone for free on weeknights; what creative writing students go broke for is the workshop. We think of writing as a private struggle, but that is now out of date. Creative writing is both social and theatrical. Seated at a large seminar table with a dozen peers, students receive advice, respond, debate the wording of a particular line, all under the parental gaze of the creative writing instructor. McGurl writes that the workshop’s sociability is alternately “supportive and savage.” Like colleges, creative writing programs always present themselves as nurturing communities, but students know that every word and attitude is subject to brutal scrutiny. Their teachers have been happy to dish it out. Flannery O’Connor believed that teaching was a negative exercise: “We can learn how not to write.”

O’Connor graduated from the country’s most prestigious writing program, which was also the first. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop began in 1936, and it was a long time in the making. The clearest point of origin for creative writing as an academic discipline is Wendell Barrett’s course in Advanced English Composition, which he began giving at Harvard in 1884. Students who had previously been asked to compose themes on given topics—“Can the immortality of the soul be proved,” say—were now asked to write daily assignments on whatever they wanted, the only criteria being “that the subject shall be a matter of observation during the day when it is written . . . and that the style shall be fluent and agreeable.” With his Vandyke beard, walking stick, and spats, Barrett was not only a teacher of creative expression but also a charismatic model of creative being. By its second year, his course was attracting one hundred and fifty students.

Barrett described his class as an “educational experiment,” and within thirty years his formulation could be found at the heart of the progressive movement in American education. In 1894, a thirty-five year old philosophy professor named John Dewey arrived at the University of Chicago. The Pullman Strike, which was taking place at the time, brought him into contact with the social scientist Jane Addams. One of the goals of Addams’ social settlement Hull-House, founded in 1889, was to help prepare the poorest members of Chicago’s rapidly expanding immigrant communities for life as Americans. Addams frequently found that the ideas they generated for guest lecturers and other educational programs were more useful than her own. Hull-House became a model for collaboration and pluralism that would resonate throughout the first half of the twentieth century.