Interview with Carl Klaus

The emergence of creative nonfiction as a discipline, as an art and a craft worthy of practice and study—in short, as a fourth literary genre—has been a significant and enduring achievement in literature of the last third of the twentieth century. Here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is well established, popular, and prominent, and its writers are more engaged than ever in expanding its possibilities and opening its boundaries. Those with a scholarly bent are aware, of course, that writers have been creating literary nonfiction as long as there has been literature. Tempting though it may be to celebrate the essays of E. B. White, or the earliest memoir of Patricia Hampl, or the literary journalism of Joan Didion and John McPhee for their roles in the fourth genre’s emergence, a longer perspective acknowledges the influence of Montaigne, Addison and Steele, and Lamb and Hazlitt, and an even longer perspective can take us back to the classical authors of Greece and Rome and, some would argue, beyond. But for nonfiction to emerge as it did in the last century required a convergence of impulses and innovations in what had seemed to be separate and mutually exclusive disciplines: composition/rhetoric, journalism, and creative writing. It is not insignificant that the rise of creative nonfiction occurred in the wake of the rise of composition as a major field of study, and that, whatever the impact of the paradigm shift in its teaching, it was grounded in the long history of rhetoric, with its shifting emphases on invention, arrangement, and style. One school that extended the study of composition into the practice of literary nonfiction was the University of Iowa. Notably, the course of creative nonfiction’s path and the career of Carl H. Klaus, founder of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, follow the same trajectory.

Carl Klaus’s earliest book, Style in English Prose (1968), was unique in its time for being divided into two sections: “Style and Stylists,” which displayed examples of prose style from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in 1066 to Tom Wolfe in 1964 and I. F. Stone in 1966, and “Stylistics,” which excerpted discussions of style by practitioners and scholars from Roger Ascham in 1570 to Walker Gibson in 1962, with many writers appearing in both sections. Klaus continued to be a significant theorist of prose style, the essay, and the essayist in Elements of the Essay (1969), co-authored with Robert Scholes; his introduction to the essay in Elements of Literature (1978), co-authored with Scholes and Nancy Comley, an anthology centered not only on fiction, poetry, and drama but also on essay and film; and the anthology In Depth: Essayists for Our Time. He also co-authored, again with Scholes, Elements of Writing (1972), a textbook, and edited Courses for Change in Writing: A Selection from the NEH/Iowa Institute (1984), a collection of model courses designed by writing-program directors who took part in the institute. He has also been a notable writer of creative nonfiction, initiating a series of daybooks with My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (1996) and following it with Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook (1997), Taking Retirement: A Beginner’s Diary (1999), and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (2006). Now a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, Klaus is coeditor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction and the author of The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay (2010), a major study of the form which Lia Purpura has characterized as “a cabinet of finely balanced wonders: treatise and revelation, study and confession, provocation and lyric—but most of all, it’s a love letter to the essay form.”

The 2010 Iowa Nonfiction Now Conference began with a reading by Carl Klaus of “Days into Essays: A Self for All Seasons,” the final essay in The Made-Up Self, as part of the “Live from Prairie Lights” series of readings, sponsored by the Iowa City bookstore. This interview was conducted at Klaus’s home in Iowa City the day after the conference.

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