After graduating in 1957, Atwood entered Victoria College of the University of Toronto to complete a B.A. in English. She was determined to write, even though she doubted that a Canadian could succeed in the U.S. dominated fiction market. During this fertile period, she read original verse at the Bohemian Embassy (a local coffeehouse) and penned satiric cartoons for This Magazine under the pseudonym Bart Gerrard. In 1961, she graduated with honors and published her first poetry collection, Double Persephone (1961), which earned the E.J. Pratt Medal. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, she obtained an M.A. from Radcliffe and initiated graduate studies at Harvard from 1962-63. At the same time, she worked in market research and wrote for the CBC the libretto of composer John Beckwith's The Trumpets of Summer.
Serving her artistic muse compromised Atwood's unfettered lifestyle. In a mock serious article for Ms. magazine, she noted, "My choices were between excellence and doom on the one hand, and mediocrity and coziness on the other. I gritted my teeth, set my face to the wind, gave up double-dating, and wore horn-rims and a scowl so I would not be mistaken for a puffball." The beginning of the feminist movement in the 1960s changed her attitude toward a self-destructive mindset that she later labeled a "post-Romantic collective delusion." Atwood discovered Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir and, at the same time, her own evolving poetic voice. She contributed poems and articles to Alphabet, Blew Ointment, Acta Victoriana, and The Strand, but found no outlets for a novel or for a collection of poems that remain unpublished.
