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John Irving

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{{Infobox Writer |John Winslow Irving (born March 2, 1942 as John Wallace Blunt, Jr.) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Since achieving great critical and popular acclaim after the international Irving chose to offer his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), to Dutton, which promised him a stronger marketing push. The novel went on to become a massive international bestseller and cultural phenomenon, and was a finalist for the American Book Award (now the National Book Award) for hardcover fiction in 1979 (the award went to Tim O'Brien for Going After Cacciato). Garp won the National Book Foundation's award for paperback fiction the following year. Garp was later made In 1985 Irving published The Cider House Rules, a sprawling epic centered around a Maine orphanage. Its central topic is abortion, and the novel is perhaps the most obvious example of Charles Dickens's influence on Irving's writing. Irving followed it in 1989 with A Prayer for Owen Meany, another New England family epic centered around themes of religiousness. Again, the main setting is a New England boarding school, and inspirations for the characters can be found in many of Irving's influences, including The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the works of Dickens. In Owen Meany, Irving for the first time examined the consequences of the Vietnam War - particularly mandatory conscription, which Irving avoided since he was already a married father and a teacher when the draft was instituted. Owen Meany became Irving's bestselling book since Garp, and is now a frequent feature on high school English reading lists.

Irving returned to Random House for his next book, A Son of the Circus (1995). 'Arguably his most complicated and difficult book, it was dismissed by critics but became a national bestseller on the strength of Irving's reputation for fashioning literate, engrossing page-turners. Irving returned to better form in 1998 with A Widow for One Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.

In 1999, after nearly ten years in development, Irving's screenplay for The Cider House '''Rules was made into a film directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Delroy Lindo. The film was nominated for several' Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.'The Fourth Hand, was published in 2001; savaged by critics, it nevertheless became a bestseller. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, a children's story originally included in A Widow for One Year, was published as a book with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann in 2004. Irving's most recent novel, entitled Until I Find You, was released on July 12, 2005.

On June 28, 2005, The New York Times published an article [1] revealing that Until I Find You contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he has never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.

Other projects

Since the publication of "Garp" made him independently wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions (including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. In addition to his novels, he has also published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a collection of his writings including a brief memoir and unpublished short fiction, My Movie Business, an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen, and The Imaginary Girlfriend, a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling.

Recent

In recent years, his three most highly regarded novels, The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been published in Modern Library editions. Owen Meany was adapted into a children's film, Simon Birch (Irving disowned this adaptation, going so far as to request that all of the characters' names be changed for the film version). In 2004, A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.

Bibliography

Quotes

  • "The building of the architecture of a novel-- the craft of it--is something I never tire of."
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