Irish view on American writing programs

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne reviews The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl in the Irish Times, making the simultaneous points that the surprising proliferation of American writing programs were a reflection of the democratization of higher education after WWII -- and that in European universities, which enjoyed a far higher level of democratization, writing programs never took off, and still haven't to any comparable extent.