Seven Decades of Innovation

Situated in New York City's Greenwich Village, The New School has been a vital center for writing and the instruction of writing since 1931 when Gorham Munson, a Manhattan editor and influential partisan of the Alfred Stieglitz circle, introduced his now-legendary workshop in creative writing. Since 1996, The New School has offered a Graduate Writing Program leading to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree with concentrations in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and writing for children.

We can't claim a first, Munson subsequently recalled. Credit for the first goes to Amherst for inviting Robert Frost to be a poet-in-residence. But when The New School began to offer writing courses, the professional writer was a rare animal on the classroom platform. We led the way in revolutionizing the teaching of writing. For notice that all of us in those years were practicing writers. We washed the typewriter ink off our hands as we started for class. These early, experimental workshops proved so decisive for the study of writing in America that soon the Saturday Review of Literature celebrated the truly wonderful prodigality of talent issuing from The New School, and cited the complement of gifted teachers at the expanded New School Writing Center. Critic Maxwell Geismar eventually observed in The Nation that The New School has become the richest center of new fiction among all our colleges and universities.

Over seven decades of steady innovation, The New School's writing and literature faculty has included many of this century's most acclaimed poets, novelists, literary critics, and editors, from past to present: Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Leroi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Kay Boyle, May Sarton, Horace Gregory, Marguerite Young, William Goyen, Richard Yates, John F. Bardin, Edward Hoagland, David Ignatow, Alfred Kazin, Anatole Broyard, Carolyn Kizer, Daniel Halpern, Carol Muske, Gilbert Sorrentino, and more recently, Sidney Offit, Pearl London, Carla Stevens, Hayes Jacobs, Hugh Seidman, David Lehman, Bernadette Mayer, David Trinidad, Susan Wheeler, David Markson, Elaine Equi, Robert Dunn, Bob Holman, Robert Polito, David Rosenberg, Nicholas Christopher, Lynne Tillman, Lloyd Schwartz, Jason Shinder, Catherine Texier, Darcey Steinke, and William Zinsser.