Vonnegut described Engle in a 1967 letter in this fashion: "The former head, Paul Engle, is still around, is a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listen closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole."[3]
In 1967, following his departure as director of the workshop, Engle and future second wife Nieh Hualing co-founded The University of Iowa's International Writing Program, which provided for dozens of published authors from around the world to visit Iowa City each year to write and collaborate. Engle left the Writer's Workshop permanently in 1969 to devote himself full-time to the international program. One of these various programmes' enduring legacies was that they helped mainstream humanist ideals of literature and writing:[4] The most famous principles advocated (though not created by the workshops) were writing from self-knowledge (write what you know) and with self-discipline (show, don’t tell), with Engle summarizing his philosophy as "sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.".[5][6]
At the time of his death (inChicago's O'Hare Airport on his way to accept an award in Poland), Engle was the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, a novel, a memoir, an opera libretto (for Philip Bezanson), and even a children's book. Engle wrote numerous articles and reviews for many of the largest periodicals of his day.[citation needed]
1954–59 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, six volumes, Doubleday.
(With Warren Carrier) Reading Modern Poetry, Scott Foresman, 1955, revised edition, 1968.
Homage to Baudelaire, on the Centennial of "Les Fleurs du Mal," Cummington Press, 1957.
(With Henri Coulette) Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, Random House, 1961.
(With Joseph Langland) Poet's Choice, Dial Press, 1962.
On Creative Writing, Dutton, 1964.
Midland II, Random House, 1970.
(And translator with wife, Hualing Nieh) Poems of Mao Tse-Tung, Dell, 1972.
(With Rowena Torrevillas and Hualing Nieh Engle) The World Comes to Iowa: Iowa International Anthology, Iowa State University (Ames, IA), 1987.
NB: for further reference, Richard B. Weber (Library of the University of Iowa, 1966) has compiled a comprehensive bibliography entitled Paul Engle: A Checklist of books Paul Engle authored, as well as of publications he edited or to which he contributed.
