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.

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