University of Montana: Where Writers Come to Study
Near Missoula, Montana
The University of Montana sits at the base of Mount Sentinel on the eastern edge of Missoula, and for more than a century it has been one of the defining institutions of the American mountain West.
The university was established by the state legislature in eighteen ninety-three, the same year Montana was just four years old as a state. The founders chose Missoula over competing cities by a single legislative vote. Classes began in eighteen ninety-five in a single building with an inaugural class of fifty students and five faculty members.
The campus grew steadily through the early twentieth century, adding colleges of law, pharmacy, forestry, and journalism. The forestry school, established in nineteen thirteen, was among the first in the nation dedicated to the study of western timber and range management. The journalism school, founded in nineteen fourteen, has produced editors and reporters who have gone on to major newspapers and media outlets across the country.
But the institution that gave the University of Montana its national literary reputation is the Creative Writing Program. Founded in nineteen twenty-two and formalized into a graduate program after World War Two, it attracted writers of the first order. Richard Hugo, the poet of blue-collar western alienation, taught here from nineteen sixty-four until his death in nineteen eighty-two. His students included James Welch, a Blackfeet and Gros Ventre novelist whose books placed Native American experience at the center of western literature, and Marilynne Robinson, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The university sits against a hillside where the letter M, made of white-painted stones, has been maintained by students since nineteen oh nine. Mount Sentinel and the adjacent Mount Jumbo are public wildlife reserves that butt directly against the campus edge, giving the university its singular character: a serious academic institution where you can walk out a classroom door and into wilderness in ten minutes.
