Godwin's first job out of college was at The Miami Herald, where she worked as a journalist for one year. There she met and briefly married photographer and co-worker, Douglas Kennedy.[1][3] They were married in 1960 and divorced several months later in 1961.[3][18] According to Godwin, she "worked very hard", but her stories were too "flamboyant" for the publication and she was fired.[15] According to Contemporary Literary Criticism, she was incorporating too much human interest into the paper's stories, which were supposed to be factual.[19] After briefly living with her mother again,[4] Godwin moved to London to distance herself from a failed marriage and job.[20]
In London Godwin worked for the U.S. Travel Service run by the American embassy[1] from 1961 to 1965.[4] Godwin said she was a "glorified receptionist," who was able to read books in secret while at work.[15] Her cousin, who was the mayor of Weaverville, North Carolina, helped to get her the job.[18] While she was employed by the embassy, Godwin completed a novel entitled Gull Key. Like many of her early works, the book focuses on a female character figuring out if marriage and being a parent is the life she wants for herself. Several publishers rejected the novel and the manuscript was lost when Godwin sent the only copy to a publisher that went out of business without returning it.[1][18]
While in England, Godwin took a course in creative writing at the City Literature Institute, where she met her second husband, psychiatrist Ian Marshall.[1] They were married two months later.[4] The marriage was brief and they were divorced in 1966.[1][3] After their breakup, Godwin returned to the United States.[1] At age 29, she took a job as fact-checker in New York City for The Saturday Evening Post. She said the job was embarrassing, because she wanted to be a writer, as opposed to fact-checking the work of others.[15]
At this point, a distant uncle of Godwin's died, leaving her an inheritance of $5,000.[14] She used the money to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, after being accepted, to move from New York to Iowa City in 1967.[4][15] There Godwin met her teacher and future mentor Kurt Vonnegut.[4] At Iowa, Godwin worked as an instructor while earning an M.A. and Ph.D. from the same university in 1968 and 1971 respectively.[1][19] She began teaching Greek Drama, before earning a position teaching literature.[1][18] By age 30, Godwin had written three novels, but was unable to get any of them published.[7]
