The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

John William Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: The Wapshot Chronicle , The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).