Excerpt

Delbert E. Wylder (1923 - 2004)

Deb Wylder started Murray State University’s creative writing program in 1977, after being hired as the new chair of the English Department.

Born in Jerseyville, Illinois, Deb grew up in nearby Morrison, where he graduated from high school before attending Coe College for a year. He planned to transfer to the University of Illinois for the next school year, but after Pearl Harbor was bombed he joined the Army Air Corps. He flew 63 combat missions in a P-47 Thunderbolt over Italy. After the war he attended the University of Iowa, where he inished his B. A. and went on to complete an M. F. A. in writing and eventually a Ph. D. in literature as well. He married while in Iowa City and had two children, Stephen and William. This marriage later ended in divorce

While teaching in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico, Deb met Edith Perry Stamm, an Emily Dickinson scholar who was also teaching there. They were married in 1965. They moved on to Colorado State and then to Southwest State University in Minnesota, where Deb also started a creative writing program and hired Stephen Dunn, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

When Edith and Deb came to Murray in 1977, they had a huge circle of friends among poets and iction writers. The irst year of the program they hired the husband-wife team of James Galvin and Jorie Graham in a joint appointment. Graham, who would eventually be both a Pulitzer Prize winner and a MacArthur Fellow, was a harbinger of the quality of writer-teachers Deb would convince to teach in the new program. In the irst few years these included Joe Ashby Porter (Academy Award in Literature recipient), Mark Jarman (NEA and Guggenheim Fellow), and Pam Durban (Whiting Writers’ Award).

The students in creative writing at Murray have also proved to be prize winners. To take just two examples, Sandra Moore had already won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for a short story before Harcourt published her novel Private Woods, and Philip F. Deaver, who eventually also taught in the program, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection of short stories Silent Retreats and later a Pushcart Prize as well. The program that Deb Wylder envisioned for Murray now has a thirty-year history and is recognized by writers across the country. He was not only a scholar who helped start the Western Literature Association and who wrote critical books about Hemingway and Emerson Hough, but also an enthusiastic reader and writer of poetry and iction. He was convinced that writing programs give a vital core to literature’s study and promote literature’s growth.

Deb died in 2004 in Albuquerque, where he and Edith had moved some years earlier, after retiring from Murray State.