The Founder: Glenn Schaeffer

Glenn Schaeffer, founder of the International Institute of Modern Letters, is president and chief financial officer for Mandalay Resort Group, which operates 16 casino properties nationwide. His educational background, however, is in literature, and he received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa’s prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is an avid collector of first editions of American poetry.

Many people find it unusual that a casino executive is so interested in supporting literature. Why is literature important to you?
You look for your own story in literature; it’s one of the best mechanisms you have to convince yourself you’re not alone. Literature — and I would add science — are both confirming disciplines. In science, you ask: “Do you see what I see?” In literature, it’s: “Do you feel what I feel?” Reading and writing are part of who I am, as a person. And for ourselves as a progressive society, we are made up, in real part, by our books or literature.

Why should literature be a matter of interest for the business community?
Literary narrative of imagination has been a stimulant to market economies and liberal societies for 500 years. Writers are explorers, critics, skeptics, and naysayers. But whenever their voices or persons are punished, you find market corruption, political totalitarianism, backward social customs, and anti-feminism. There haven’t been any long-lived exceptions to this rule. Progress itself doesn’t occur apart from a free commerce in ideas, often rendered in stories. Maybe because literature is also fun, it’s been the first target of tyrannical governments and religious zealots.

Literature causes trouble?
That’s what the repressive or corrupt authorities seem to believe. They fear literature. That’s why they crack down so hard on the isolated scribbler here or there. But censorship, given time, generally fails. We’d like to speed up its failure rate in contemporary life.

“Saving a few good books” is your notion of social activism?
Well, tyrants typically set out to burn books. Before torching the Reichstag, Hitler burned mounds of literature, because literature is symbolic of the individual spirit. The institute, in its small way, will serve to protect and publish literary works of independent self-expression.

You’d argue that progress is a literary value?
This is how modern society thrives, by risk and new ideas. According to a business writer like Malcolm Gladwell, social and market progress often happens by tiny, seemingly undetectable actions — tipping points, as Gladwell calls them. Books have been those tipping points, again and again.

An example?
Thomas Paine’s polemical pamphlet, Common Sense, which sounded a defiant American spirit and stirred a political revolution, that, turn upon turn, reversed world power over the next two hundred years — from Eurocentric colonialism to global Americanism. Not everyone’s supremely happy with that outcome, but the material result for the masses has few parallels, if any, in world history.

Another book was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s social protest novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For some reason, this book’s not held in the esteem it once was, but its message united one of the world’s most victorious armies. Every Union soldier’s backpack came standard issue with a copy of Uncle Tom, not the Bible. It’s hard to prosecute any war, let alone one of such high stakes and cost, without an anthem. We’d have been a different and lesser country without that novel.

You’ve discussed some “big-picture” reasons for why literature is important to business. Are there more tangible, day-to-day benefits business receives from literature?
Business is about character, and character is the subject of literary fiction.

You obviously put a lot of stock in the liberal arts.
Liberal arts teaches people to exercise judgment, analyze complex ideas, tolerate differing viewpoints, and form cohesive arguments. Those are the traits of success in any social environment like business or government.

On a personal level, what books have been important to you?
The Great Gatsby was a major influence. It was after reading that novel that I decided I wanted to be a writer like Fitzgerald. As a result, I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I seem to have completely missed the point of the novel, however, and aspired to live Gatsby’s life, minus the inventions. (So did Fitzgerald himself, it seems to me.) And at the workshop, I learned I didn’t want to be a writer, so I went into business instead.

You might say that, in quite nonlinear ways, both that novel and the Iowa Workshop have had very positive outcomes for me. I also remind people all the time that the Iowa Workshop is the most selective graduate school in the country, and I wouldn’t want to try over.