Did you know that Joseph Heller began writing his famous satirical novel about war, Catch-22, while teaching English at Penn State in the 1950s?  Did you know that the namesake for our campus’ Pattee Library, Fred Lewis Pattee, had his novel The House of the Black Ring rejected in various forms fourteen times before it was published in 1905?

For more about the history of these and other Penn State writers, stop by Burrowes Building’s fourth floor display case, which has a new design and new material, just in time to inspire Penn State students writers for the new semester. In addition to learning about Heller and Pattee, you’ll see information about and books by Theodore Roethke, Joseph L. Grucci, John Barth, Diane Ackerman, Agah Shahid Ali, and Robin Becker.

The project was created as collaboration between Director of Creative Writing Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Sophia Alexander, a design major with a creative writing minor. Sophia is in her last semester here at Penn State and she will use this project in her design portfolio as she searches for jobs this semester.

Professor Kasdorf notes: “My hope in putting this together is that students will see themselves as part of this long and rich tradition of people writing works of literature in this place.”