Wilbur Lang Schramm (August 5, 1907 – December 27, 1987), was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1935 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars. Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media. At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day. Schramm was born in Marietta, Ohio, to a musical, middle-class family whose ancestry hailed from Schrammburg, Germany. His father Arch Schramm played the violin, his mother Louise the piano, and Wilbur Schramm himself played the flute. His father was a lawyer in Marietta, Ohio. Due to their Teutonic name, his father's legal practice suffered. Wilbur Schramm "suffered from a stammer which at times severely hampered his speech, and which he never fully conquered". Schramm developed a severe stutter at age five due to an improperly performed tonsillectomy. Schramm's stutter was traumatic to him and he avoided speaking in public because of it. Instead of giving the valedictory address at his high school graduation, Schramm played the flute.
