Iowa City has produced an enormous amount of literature; pick a few to read before visiting.
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) — set just up the road in the fictional town of Gilead but written in Iowa City, this Pulitzer-winning novel captures the slow, religious, prairie-Iowa interior that surrounds the university bubble.
- John Irving, The Water-Method Man (1972) — Irving wrote this at the Writers' Workshop and the early chapters are recognisably Iowa City: the brick streets, the dive bars, the Iowa River.
- Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952) — completed while she was a graduate student here. Not set in Iowa but unmistakably the work of an outsider who used her two cold Iowa winters to find her voice.
- Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal (2008) — written by a New Zealander who came through the Workshop; useful for showing how the program funnels international voices through this small Midwestern town.
- Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac (2016) — set partly in Iowa City and at the university by a longtime Workshop faculty member.