The idea of going to Michigan came from an acquaintance who worked in a grocery store and had been at the University for one year. The tuition was within reason, if one saved for a couple of years, but the thing that clinched it was the Hopwood Awards...The idea that a University cared that much about writing made it necessary to go there.
- Arthur Miller (who won a Hopwood Award worth $250, enough in 1936 to pay his tuition)
Giving Online:
Established in 1931, thanks to a generous bequest from Avery Hopwood, a Michigan alum (class of 1905) and one of the most popular dramatists of the Jazz Age, Hopwood Awards in fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction have been made to more than three thousand gifted recipients, amoung them Arthur Miller, Betty Smith, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Hayden, Lawrence Kasdan, Edmund White and Jesmyn Ward, winners of Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards and the authors of such varied works as Death of a Salesman, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Over the decades, those writers and generations of other winners have received more than 4.5 million dollars in support from the Hopwood Program. Their subsequent careers are a testament to the value of such encouragement and to the generosity of Avery Hopwood and the hundreds of other donors who've added to the Hopwood fund and established the several other distinguished prizes adminstered by the Hopwood Program. I hope you'll consider joining us and them in sustaining the Hopwood Awards into their second century.
To discuss a donation to any of the other prizes and contests administered by the Hopwood Program, please contact
Hopwood Program Manager
University of Michigan
435 S. State St.
1176 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Phone: (734) 764-6296 | hopwoodprogram@umich.edu
