Mark McGurl changed how American literary history gets told by taking seriously the institution that everyone in it had agreed to ignore. The Program Era (2009) argues that the creative writing programme is the defining condition of postwar American fiction — not a corrupting influence on it, and not incidental to it, but the system that trained, employed and shaped nearly every writer of consequence after 1945. He traces the doctrines the workshop transmits — show don't tell, find your voice, write what you know — and shows what they produced: technical modernism, high cultural pluralism and lower-middle-class modernism, each with its own relation to autobiography and craft. The book refuses the standard complaint that programmes homogenize writing, and argues instead that they generated more formal variety than the market alone would have supported. It won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Everything and Less (2021) extended the method to Amazon, reading contemporary fiction as shaped by the logic of the platform that now distributes it. McGurl teaches at Stanford.