U-M honors 'father' of generations of top authors

Updated 11:00 AM January 16, 2006

U-M honors 'father' of generations of top authors

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By Joe Serwach
News Service

New York literary agents and publishers regularly call Nicholas Delbanco in the Hopwood Room on campus asking, "Who's hot?"

Like basketball scouts hunting superstars, the agents are on the lookout for future best sellers and blockbusters. They're looking for Hopwood Award winners, knowing the track record of past recipients.

Many of those who became part of Hopwood's legacy will gather at U-M this year to celebrate the program's 75th anniversary with a series of events to showcase their life's work as well as that of Avery Hopwood.

The Hopwood Room hums with writing students sharing ideas and chocolate chip cookies around an oak roundtable once used by Hopwood, the most successful Broadway playwright of the Roaring 20s. The small library is filled with books and other works written by winners of the nation's oldest and largest collegiate prize for creative writing.

Books lining the shelves include such literary classics as "Death of a Salesman," as well as the 2005 best seller "The Historian." Some of the winners also produced wildly familiar films: "Body Heat," "The Big Chill," "The Shootist," "Where the Boys Are," "The Misfits," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Superman" and the more recent "State of Grace," which starred Sean Penn.

The common thread: the varied works were composed by writers who won Hopwood Awards while attending U-M. To date, the program has awarded 3,039 prizes totaling more than $2.1 million. Many winners refer to the prize as the first public validation of their writing talent, the tangible achievement they needed to pursue their work seriously.

Students meeting in the Hopwood Room marvel over how classmate Jesmyn Ward won $16,900 worth of prizes last spring. Master of fine arts student Nani Mun arrived at U-M from California by way of South Korea for a shot at a Hopwood.

"When I was looking at colleges, one of the big criteria was the funding, so you look at all the awards and contests they offer and the Hopwoods really stand out and definitely helped me choose U-M," Mun says.

Derek Mong of Ohio won his first Hopwood, $6,000 for poetry, calling the size of his prize unheard of in the world of poetry.

Seventy years earlier, aspiring playwright Arthur Miller won a $250 Hopwood, enough to pay his room and board for a year and keep him at U-M on the way to becoming one of the best-known writers of the 20th century.

Prior to Hopwood, creative writing was not widely considered a serious educational pursuit, Delbanco says. But when a large amount of money is attached to something, Americans take notice and the Hopwood Awards "put a foot in the door, then wedged it open in perpetuity," leading to the creation of other prizes as well a large number of creative writing programs across the country.

In that sense, Delbanco says, "Hopwood is really the father of us all," including the past 30 years of growing creative writing programs nationwide.

"He had an unerring sense for entertainment. Hopwood was the Neil Simon of his time," says Delbanco, the Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English who chairs the award committee. "When he imagined the awards, it was authentically an innovative idea, and now one that's steeped in tradition. It was a wholly new idea and today people in the literary world know what it means. The cachet is at least as important as the cash."

The Hopwoods have inspired more gifts so the contest has grown from eight prizes totaling $13,000 in 1931 to 79 awards prizes totaling more than $160,000 last year. This year marks 75 years since the Avery and Jule Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing began with a $313,836 endowment set up in the years after Avery Hopwood's death in 1928.

At age 39, still a young man at the height of his popularity, Hopwood decided to create a contest at his alma mater that would attract and develop the best young writers of the future. While he was popular enough to have four shows on Broadway at the same time, Hopwood aspired to create truly great and memorable writing, something he felt he never did on his own with profitable, though largely forgotten, plays such as "Ladies' Night (In a Turkish Bath)."

Hopwood, a 1905 U-M graduate who popularized the phrase "gold diggers" for a play by the same name to be performed by the Theatre & Drama Department this February, wanted students competing for Hopwood awards to "be allowed the widest possible latitude'' and asked that "the new, the unusual, and the radical ... be especially encouraged."

Miller, who won his Hopwood Awards in 1936 and 1937, went on to write the classic "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible," standard texts in American literature classes to this day.

Other Hopwood winners who became part of a who's-who of writers of the last three generations include, Max Apple, John Ciardi, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Hayden, Laura Kasischke, Jane Kenyon, Howard Moss, Frank O'Hara, Marge Piercy, Ronald Wallace and Nancy Willard.

One of the most recent winners, Elizabeth Kostova, who won Hopwoods in 2003 and 2004, still is riding high on the best-seller list for her debut novel, "The Historian." As part of the celebration, Kostova will conduct a reading in the Rackham Amphitheatre.

U-M honors 'father' of generations of top authors

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