Recent columns about famous Iowans generated several additional names, including John Wayne, born in Winterset; Gary Cooper, who attended Grinnell College; and the Everly Brothers, who launched their singing careers from Shenandoah.

Other suggestions led me to realize there was a category I completely missed: literature. Iowa has produced bushels of good writers, not to mention a smattering of well-known fictional characters. Such as:

• Radar O’Reilly, the uncommonly prescient corporal in the “M*A*S*H” movie and TV series who frequently mentioned his hometown, Ottumwa.

• Capt. James T. Kirk, the 23rd-century commander of the starship USS Enterprise in the 1960s TV show “Star Trek.” Producer Gene Roddenberry once said Kirk was “born in a small town in Iowa,” prompting the Washington County town of Riverside in 1985 to announce it was where Kirk would be born on March 22, 2228.

• Miss Piggy, girlfriend of Kermit the Frog. Muppet-creator Frank Oz told the New York Times that Miss Piggy “grew up in a small town; her father died when she was young and her mother wasn’t nice to her. She had to enter beauty contests to survive.” As a result, the Iowa town of Keystone claimed Miss Piggy came from a local litter delivered in 1974.

• Bill the Cat, a character in Berkeley Breathed’s surrealistic, counter-culture comic strips, “Bloom County,” “Outland” and “Opus” (1983-2015). Storylines identified Bill as the unclaimed offspring of Jim Davis’ cartoon cat Garfield and had lived in Dubuque with his girlfriend, Sally, before achieving comic strip fame.    

• Francesca Johnson, the farmwife/love interest of a National Geographic photographer in the steamy novel “The Bridges of Madison County,” written by Charles City native and former University of Northern Iowa Business School Dean Robert James Waller.

• Blue Boy, the prize hog owned by the fictional Frake family in Iowa native Phil Stong’s 1932 novel “State Fair.” Spoiler alert: Blue Boy became grand champion, but not without receiving encouragement from Esmeralda, a sow he meets at the fair.

Stong was born in and is buried near Keosauqua. He attended Drake University and worked two years at the Des Moines Register before moving to New York. He was 33 when he wrote “State Fair,” and went on to write and edit science fiction stories.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, led by Paul Engle from 1941 to 1965, employed several well-known authors as faculty, including Kurt Vonnegut, who began work on “Slaughterhouse-Five” while in Iowa City in the mid-1960s. At the time, Vonnegut also mentored John Irving, whose later works include “The Cider House Rules.”

Philip Roth, author of “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1967), and “The Plot Against America” (2004), taught at the workshop from 1960 to 1962.

Other workshop instructors include novelists Richard Yates, John Cheever and Marilynne Robinson, as well as U.S. Poet Laureates Robert Penn Warren, Mona Jane Van Duyn, Robert Hass and Louise Gluck.

Iowa’s two most prolific and widely known living authors are Bill Bryson, a Des Moines native who spent much of his adult life in England, and Jane Smiley.

Bryson’s 20 books include “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” a memoir about growing up in Des Moines; “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail” and “One Summer: America, 1927,” which tells stories of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight, Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season and other events that year.

Smiley, who graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1970s, taught at Iowa State University in the 1980s and ’90s, and has written more than 30 books, including “A Thousand Acres,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a nonfiction book about ISU’s John Atanasoff, “The Man Who Invented the Computer.”

Muscatine writer Max Allan Collins launched his career by taking over the Dick Tracy comic strip before moving on to graphic novels, which include the “Road to Perdition” series.

Perhaps Iowa’s most notable 21st-century writer is Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose early life in Waterloo inspired the New York Times’ ground-breaking series, “The 1619 Project,” a much-needed retelling of history from too-long ignored minority viewpoints.