In March 2016, the literary organization VIDA published a series of anonymous statements that accused the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis of predatory and abusive behavior. The collected accounts allege unwanted advances, mockery, physical violence, and threats to ruin women’s careers over several years. Fifty-two years old at the time and widely respected in the field, in January that year Ellis had been appointed a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Soon after VIDA published these voices, Ellis’s classes were canceled, and a university official confirmed they were “looking into the situation.” The case was a now-familiar mix of multiple accusations, whisper network support, and a critique of the ways that structures of power can enable abuse and prohibit clear expressions of consent. Call it a #MeToo coup avant la lettre.

A DELICATE AGGRESSION: SAVAGERY AND SURVIVAL IN THE IOWA WRITERS’ WORKSHOP by David O. Dowling Yale University Press, 440 pp., $35.00

Reporting on the Ellis accusations, Jia Tolentino called “troubling behavior from powerful men in creative fields” a “tradition.” This tradition goes back a long way at Iowa, perhaps the most prestigious MFA writing program in the United States. The first degree-granting creative writing program in the country, the Workshop accepts only a tiny portion of those who apply (around 3.7 percent in 2016) and promises high rewards. Agents come to Iowa City to scout talent; faculty members connect students with editors; famous visiting writers admit students into their coteries. Eighteen Iowa graduates have won the Pulitzer Prize, and thousands more have published books, often to critical acclaim. The faculty is similarly accomplished.

But some of these accomplished teachers are the very same people who harass, intimidate, and shun. Tolentino’s reporting suggested that Ellis’s alleged behavior was especially distressing to students at Iowa because it recalled stories about other poets and teachers at the Workshop over the years. A sample of incidents from the Workshop’s illustrious, 83-year history: In the 1960s, the writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a faculty member, suggested to a new hire that the latter avoid seducing undergrads, but he implied that grad students were fair game; he also admitted to having “interfer[ed] with a student’s clothing,” to use his words. The poet John Berryman groped a student in the back seat of a car, en route to a party, and then balked when she tried to brush him off. (“What? You mean you don’t fuck?”) There were sexual solicitations, quid pro quo exchanges, and drunken brawls, often over a woman. “The teachers were completely fucked up,” the writer Sandra Cisneros said of her time there in the late 1970s. “They seemed to think that free booty was part of their compensation package.”

Exposing sexism is not the stated purpose of David O. Dowling’s new book, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That, according to the introduction, is to examine “the impact of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on literary culture and the publishing industry” by narrating the careers of important contemporary authors who taught or studied there under a series of distinctive directors, from its founding to the present. The impact is certainly profound: In 15 brief biographies, Dowling demonstrates how many of the twentieth century’s most celebrated American authors shaped this institutional setting and were shaped by it. He shows too how deeply entwined the Workshop and the publishing industry have been since the 1940s—it is no accident that so many books reviewed in The New York Times bear the imprimatur of Iowa. The poet Paul Engle, who took over the directorship of the Workshop in 1941, emphasized professional development; over more than two decades at the helm, he worked tirelessly to secure prize money and corporate sponsorship for individual students and for the program as a whole. The goal for students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is and has always been to publish. Dowling is intrigued by the contradictions generated under Engle’s stewardship, which he traces through the Workshop’s later decades: How can writing be both pathbreaking and popular? Does institutional orthodoxy stifle innovation? How can one be a “man of letters” and a “man of business,” as Engle aimed to be?

These questions have been tackled ably elsewhere, by scholars such as D.G. Myers, Mark McGurl, and Eric Bennett. What Dowling offers that is new, and important, is a thoroughgoing record of the varying ways sexism has shaped the Workshop experience. He has been through the literature and archives, and he has found a number of letters, interviews, and memoirs describing incidents of sexual misconduct. The book is heavily footnoted. (Dowling, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, follows academic practices of citation.) His book demonstrates how institutional sexism involves more than just discrete incidents of sexual harassment: It permeates a program’s culture and expectations. Dowling relates anecdotes about boxing matches, the rampages of Norman Mailer, and the challenges of attending seminars while mothering two small children. He also tells of the aid that women writers offered one another, of their defiance of male authority, and of alternative workshops they formed in contradistinction to Iowa. There seems to have been plenty of savagery in Iowa City, but that same place gave rise to creative forms of resistance and strategies for survival.