John Irving

For more information on John Winslow Irving, visit Britannica.com.

One of a few modern best-selling writers who also has literary stature, John Irving (born 1942) rose to prominence in 1979 with his fourth novel, "The World According to Garp". His novels have combined 19th century traditions with modern-day melodrama, sex, and random violence. In 2000, his screenplay adaptation of "The Cider House Rules" won an Academy Award.

Beginnings in Academic Life and Wrestling

Born John Wallace Blunt, Jr., in Exeter, New Hampshire, Irving grew up in academia. His mother, Frances, and father, an Army Air Force pilot, divorced before Irving was born and at age six Irving's mother remarried. Her new husband adopted Irving, giving him the name he is known by today. Absent parents played major roles in Irving's later novels, but in real life Irving grew up satisfied to have his stepfather and never met his biological father. His stepfather, Colin, taught history at the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy. Irving enjoyed the rights of a faculty child, gaining automatic entry into Exeter, despite his poor grades. It was years before anyone realized he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia.

During his time at Exeter, Irving took up wrestling, and it became a lifelong pursuit that spilled over into his novels. Beyond being an integral part of his novels, Irving credited wrestling with preparing him for life. Comparing writing and wrestling, Irving explained to Joan Smith of the on-line publication Salon, "I think what success I've had is more a testimony to my stamina, to my ability to work hard and work long than it is to any talent I would consider God-given or natural." Irving said that he loved wrestling because it was the first thing he was good at. He has often spoken of his first coach, Ted Seabrooke, as a major influence on his life.

After graduating from Exeter in 1961, Irving followed his interest in wrestling to the University of Pittsburgh. The following year, Irving transferred to New Hampshire and won a grant to study in Europe in 1963-64. He chose the University of Vienna Institute of European Studies because it seemed an exotic atmosphere, a place where he found a sense of anonymity and learned to "pay attention." Austria was central to Irving's first five novels.

In August 1964, Irving married photographer Shyla Leary whom he had met in Cambridge. He re-enrolled in the University of New Hampshire (where he had briefly studied earlier) in 1965. His first son, Colin, was born the same year Irving received a B.A. degree cum laude. Irving would point to the importance of becoming a father and how it later shaped his view of the world as a dangerous place. He told People's Kim Hubbard, "I think the anxiety of being a parent - that's really been my sense of myself." While at New Hampshire, Irving had two short stories published - "A Winter Branch" in a 1965 issue of Redbook and "Weary Kingdom" in a 1968 Boston Review.

Now fully focused on writing, Irving moved his family to Iowa so he could attend the prestigious University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Once there, he studied with Vance Bourjaily and Kurt Vonnegut. Setting Free the Bears, published in 1968, was well reviewed but sold modestly. It was the first of several books in which bears would play a key role.

After earning his M.F.A. in 1967, Irving had a university writing career that spanned ten years. It included grants from Rockefeller Foundation in 1972, the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1974, and the Guggenheim in 1976. Over the coming years, Irving would teach at Windham College in Putney, Vermont; Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts; the Writer's Workshop in Iowa; and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. He helped make ends meet by coaching wrestling.

Following the release of Bears, Irving lived in Putney, Vermont, and in Vienna. His second son, Brendan, was born in 1971 and Irving wrote his second novel, The Water-Method Man, in 1972. He admitted to Marcus Griel in a December 13, 1979, Rolling Stone interview that he had "wanted to write a book, if I could, with a happy ending, because I didn't feel I had a happy ending in me, and I wanted to get one. I wanted to write a book that was absolutely comic." In her book John Irving, Carol Harter declared that this second novel was an enormous improvement over his first. She praised Irving's strong characters, fine control of tone, successful manipulation of point of view, and dramatic shifts in time sequence. She was not alone in her critical praise, but Irving enjoyed little reward in the way of sales. He worked as a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa from 1972 to 1975.

Irving patterned his third novel, The 158-Pound Marriage, on Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges and in the process grew more comfortable with first person narration. But some critics consider it one of his weaker novels. The Los Angeles Times's Michael Harris wrote in 1994, "In retrospect [The 158-Pound Marriage] seems the thinnest and meanest of his books. Its wife-swapping American academics lack seriousness, and Irving lets his contempt for them show."

Literary Acclaim Achieved

Despite his past critical acclaim, no one could have predicted the meteoritic rise Irving would experience when his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, was released in 1978. Irving became an immediate sensation and was able to leave academia and become a full-time writer. Garp was a family saga of the admirable hero T. S. Garp, a writer and father, and the illegitimate son of a nurse turned radical feminist. The novel was a complex interweaving of several life stories, filled with the steadying influence of the New England coastline. Its plot featured such surprises as a pro-football player-turned transvestite family friend, along with several catastrophic events. The novel was wildly popular and in 1980 was awarded the American Book Award for best paperback novel of 1979.

Irving's first marriage ended in 1981, as his career continued to soar. His next book, The Hotel New Hampshire, shared the reach of Garp, following the life arcs of a family full of quirky characters, while maintaining a comic-satiric tone.

After Hotel, Irving wrote some less convoluted novels. The Cider House Rules, published in 1985, was almost entirely a birth to death narrative. But Cider House stood out from his earlier novels in another way - it was a polemic, taking on the issue of abortion, filled with detailed descriptions of abortion and the depressing reality of unwanted pregnancies. "[It] not only imitates the form of a Victorian novel, it may be the most Victorian novel of our times," said Harris of the Los Angeles Times. A Prayer for Owen Meany, published in 1989, was called Irving's "second breakthrough," by Harris. The novel followed the lifespan of Owen Meany, a Christ-like figure, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Some critics considered it his best novel.

In answer to questions about how autobiographical his novels were, Irving dismissed the notion, "I can invent more interesting characters than most people I know," he stated at a question-and-answer session at New York's 92nd Street Y in 2001. "In the world of writing about writers, personal experience is, in my view, always overestimated, and the imagination is almost always devalued." On other occasions, however, Irving also acknowledged the autobiographical themes present in his novels of absent parents and lost children, and that his grandmother was the model for Harriet Wheelwright in A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Books Became Films

At the same time Irving became a best-selling author, his celebrity-status increased because of films based on his novels. His unusual characters and event-filled novels attracted attention as potential screenplays. The World According to Garp was made into a film of the same name starring Robin Williams in 1982. In 1984 The Hotel New Hampshire followed. One project, Simon Birch, was a failed attempt at adapting Owen Meany, and lost Irving's endorsement. Irving finally got the chance to adapt one of his novels to screen with The Cider House Rules. In 1999, he documented his turn to scriptwriting and the 13-year struggle he undertook to bring Cider House to the screen in My Movie Business: A Memoir.

Irving remarried in 1987. His second wife, Janet Turn-bull, was a publisher at Bantam-Seal books when she met him and, after their marriage, became his literary agent and first editor. In 1991, their son Everett was born.

Critics sometimes pointed to Irving's writing as pandering to his audience. "I've read about myself that I am not to be taken seriously because I am a shameless entertainer, a crowd pleaser," he told Richard Bernstein of the New York Times. "You bet. I am. My feeling is I'm not going to get you to believe anything if I can't get you to finish the book. I have a very simple formula, which is that you've got to be more interested on page 320 than on page 32." Irving cited Dickens, George Eliot, Gunter Grass, Robertson Davies, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie as his models. He believed in diligent rewriting and again pointed to the value of his wrestling discipline, saying that writing was one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline.

Believing strongly in his role as a storyteller, Irving described his approach to writing. "There's a procedure I go through when I write," he told People's Hubbard. "I always try to think: Okay, this is what you think is coming. But what would be worse?" And in another interview with New York Times's Bernstein he stated, "It is my deliberate decision to create someone who is capable of moving you and then hurting him. It's an honorable 199th-century technique." With his later novels, A Son of the Circus, A Widow for One Year, and The Fourth Hand Irving continued a remarkable career and his novels enjoyed wide appeal.

Although widely recognized for his successful career in the United States, Irving benefited significantly from his international appeal. "More than half of my audience is in translation," Irving told Salon's Smith. "'A Son of the Circus,' my last novel, sold as many hardcover copies in France as it sold in the U.S. … So my biggest market is not English language and it hasn't been in the United States for years."

In the acknowledgements for The Fourth Hand, Irving wrote: "Every novel I've written has begun with a 'What if … "' The seed for Hand came from his wife, Janet, asking a question as they watched a news story about the first hand transplant in the United States, "What if the donor's widow demands visitation rights with the hand?" Irving worked feverishly and over the next 48 hours developed the entire storyline and title overnight. In one way, this was typical for Irving, because he always knew where his books would end before starting them, then he worked back to the beginning. "At the point where I actually write that first sentence," he told New York Times's Mel Gussow, "I'm really ready to go until I drop. I'm remembering the story." The Fourth Hand was shorter than most of Irving's novels and was the first that didn't trace its character from childhood and span generations.

Irving's work on The Fourth Hand drew him away from research he was doing for a novel called Until I Find You, set in the world of tattoo artists and church organists. In 2001, plans were announced for Irving and director Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules) to adapt The Fourth Hand for the screen. George Clooney was mentioned as a possible lead.

Irving maintains a strong relationship with all three of his sons. He divides his time between a rustic, hilltop home in southern Vermont overlooking the Green Mountains, a Toronto apartment, and an Ontario cottage on Georgian Bay. His routine includes sitting down eight hours each day to write and taking time out to practice wrestling. He writes his first drafts in longhand and then continues on one of many of his Selectric typewriters. Despite a prolific career, Irving seemed to be at another peak in 2001, busy on both a screenplay and a new novel. "It's funny to be 59 and busier than I was 20 years ago," he told New York Times's Gussow. " … I have never filled the day and the night so much with writing."

Books

Harter, Carol C. and Thompson, James R., John Irving, Twayne, 1986.

John Irving, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2001.

Periodicals

Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1994.

Maclean's, July 23, 2001.

Mother Jones, May/June 1997.

New York Times, April 25, 1989; April 28, 1998; August 1, 2001.

People, July 30, 2001.

Publishers Weekly, October 25, 1999.

Variety, April 23, 2001.

Online

Contemporary Novelists, reproduced in Biography Resource Center,http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (November 9, 2001).

Joan Smith, "The Salon Interview: John Irving," http://www.salon.com/march97/interview970303.html (October 26, 2001).

"John Irving/Author Biography," http://www.randomhouse.com/atrandom/johnirving/author.html (November 13, 2001).

(b. 1942)

1978	The World According to Garp. After three modestly successful novels--Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974)--Irving breaks through with a fanciful tale about a writer murdered by a disapproving reader. The story interweaves the writer's characteristic fascinations with marital infidelity, Vienna, wrestling, and violent death. It sells over three million copies and establishes Irving in the front rank of literary novelists. Born in New Hampshire, Irving attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the model for the Steering School in The World According to Garp.
1981	The Hotel New Hampshire. Irving treats three decades of the troubled Berry family, proprietors of hotels in New Hampshire, Vienna, and Maine, with a plot that blends violent and grotesque situations. The book generally disappoints critics as a retread of characteristics better handled in The World According to Garp.
1985	The Cider House Rules. The novel recounts the career of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an obstetrician between the 1890s and the mid-twentieth century, whose Maine orphanage doubles as a clinic for safe, illegal abortions. Irving would win an Academy Award for the 1999 film screenplay.
1989	A Prayer for Owen Meany. In Irving's novel, the title character tries to prevent his friend Johnny (the narrator) from going to Vietnam. Seen as tragic, the war forms the backdrop to the novel's exploration of the era's significance. Irving's powerful storytelling, his gift for creating memorable characters, his humor, and his elemental emotional power stimulate critics to compare him to Charles Dickens.
1994	A Son of the Circus. Irving assembles his characteristic cast of eccentrics in a series of often bizarre situations, as an Indian-born orthopedic surgeon living in Canada returns to Bombay to study the genetics of dwarfism among Indian circus clowns. Bharati Mukherjee calls the novel Irving's "most daring and most vibrant" but also his "least satisfying"--he "India-surfs himself into exhaustion until the subcontinent becomes, for the reader as well as for one of his characters, neither symbol nor place but a blur of alarming images."
1996	Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. In a miscellaneous collection of short stories and essays, Irving offers homage to Günter Grass and Charles Dickens; in "An Imaginary Girlfriend," he treats his development as a writer.
1998	A Widow for One Year. Irving's novel features his first female main character, writer Ruth Cole, who is shown at several stages of her life trying to cope with childhood trauma and adult relationship failures, all of which fuel her writing career.
1999	My Movie Business: A Memoir. The writer critiques the differences between novels and screenplays, between writing and filmmaking, in this account of bringing The Cider House Rules (1985) to the screen.

Quotes:

"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

"Half my life is an act of revision."

"You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed."

• Born: Mar 02, 1942 in Exeter, New Hampshire
• Occupation: Writer, Actor
• Active: '80s-'90s
• Major Genres: Comedy Drama, Drama
• Career Highlights: The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, Simon Birch
• First Major Screen Credit: The World According to Garp (1982)

Biography

After years of struggling in literary anonymity, novelist John Irving became that rare kind of writer: a creator of serious fiction whose work enjoyed both popularity and critical acclaim, and whose fame blossomed even more when his books began to be made into films -- even if the final onscreen products achieved only varying degrees of success. Born in 1942 in Exeter, NH, he attended the Phillips Exeter Academy (where his stepfather taught Russian history), a well-known New England prep school that eventually served as the model for the Steering School in The World According to Garp. While there, Irving discovered two of his great loves -- and, ultimately, literary metaphors: writing and wrestling. After graduation, he spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Vienna, a setting that would find a place in many of his later stories. Irving traveled around Europe on a motorcycle, lived a bohemian lifestyle, and, at one point, met a man with a trained bear, an animal that would also become an important figure in a number of his tales. After returning to the U.S., Irving graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1965 and moved on to graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he studied with author Kurt Vonnegut and began work on his first novel.

Irving received his M.F.A. in 1967 and returned to New England with his wife Shyla and son Colin; Setting Free the Bears was published the following year. Although it was critically well received, it sold less than 7,000 copies. Nevertheless, the money allowed the new novelist to buy a house in Vermont, where he lived until he returned to Vienna for three years (during which time a second son, Brendan, was born). While there, he worked with director Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) on a film adaptation of Setting Free the Bears. At one point set to star Orson Welles, Jon Voight, and, later, Al Pacino, the project eventually fell through. Irving returned to the States, where, in 1972, he completed work on his second novel, The Water-Method Man. Drawing heavily on his experiences of living in Vienna, being a graduate student in Iowa, and exposure to the film industry with Kershner, this book also met with good reviews, but didn't sell much better than his first work. Irving spent the next three years as writer-in-residence and visiting lecturer back at the University of Iowa and contributed pieces to various magazines, but grew restless, bored, and sick of teaching. During this dark period, he published his third novel, The 158-Pound Marriage. Although his best-reviewed work to date, it nevertheless proved to be his worst seller.

Tired of Iowa, Irving moved back to New England in 1975, continued to teach, and signed with a new publisher, E.P. Dutton; the first book he published with that company would change his life forever. In 1978, The World According to Garp became a huge commercial and critical success (selling more than 100,000 copies in hardcover), and Irving was suddenly both a famous, respected literary figure and a best-selling author. Garp was later made into a feature film starring Robin Williams and Glenn Close, both relative-newcomers at the time. Released in 1982, the movie by George Roy Hill (who also made Slaughterhouse Five from Vonnegut's novel -- another difficult adaptation) was received well. The book's success and Irving's new celebrity status had also allowed him to retire from teaching and devote his time to writing. His next novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, was published in 1981 and had an initial printing of 150,000 copies. Unlike Garp, however, the film adaptation on this book, Irving's fifth, was a star-studded affair. Featuring Jodie Foster, Beau Bridges, Rob Lowe, and Nastassja Kinski (who spends most of the film in a bear suit), the The Hotel New Hampshire film in 1984 was also a disaster -- even Irving gingerly distanced himself from it -- and left many of the author's fans wondering how such an awful film could have been made from such a wonderfully rich novel. In fact, as his books and stories became longer, more complex, and less frequent (Irving was slowly becoming known as something of a modern Charles Dickens), it was obvious that his stories, with their intricately woven plots, seemingly endless subplots, and detailed character development, just did not translate well to the big screen. Indeed, it would be 14 years until another movie was made from his work.

While continuing to work on books, Irving spent more than a decade trying to develop more screenplays -- most notably of his 1985 novel The Cider House Rules -- and his struggles with this project, in particular, and the film industry, in general (dating back to developing a script for Setting Free the Bears), was documented in a 1999 memoir, My Movie Business. Ironically, although struggling for 13 years (and with four different directors) to make a film of Cider House, it was a later book, 1989's A Prayer for Owen Meany, that served as the basis for the next Irving film, Simon Birch (1998). But, again -- in addition to being another box-office disappointment -- the general consensus was that, as with The Hotel New Hampshire, Simon Birch did not exactly live up to the novel upon which it was based.

After years of frustration, The Cider House Rules was finally filmed. Controversial and unabashedly pro-choice, the book was the author's most political to date, and when the movie (directed by Lasse Hallström [What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat]) was finally released in 1999, it was obvious that this adaptation carried more of Irving's personal stamp. Not only did he write the script (winning an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), but he also had a small role as the grumpy, disapproving stationmaster. Starring Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine, the film -- although missing several elements and characters from the novel -- was the most successful screen translation of Irving's work to date. Caine also won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal as the ether-addicted, kind-hearted Dr. Larch, who runs an orphanage and illegal abortion clinic in Maine during the first half of the 20th century.

Irving's eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, was published in 1994. Ironically, the story, set in India, began as a parallel screenplay (originally titled "Escaping Maharashtra") that was finished years before the book itself. Initially scheduled for production in 1997, and then again in 1999 -- both times starring Jeff Bridges -- the film fell through each time.

In addition to his Oscar, Irving has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Divorced in 1982, Irving remarried five years later to Janet Turnbull, with whom he had a third son, Everett. He published his tenth novel, The Fourth Hand, in 2001. Irving's ninth work of fiction, A Widow for One Year, was adapted into the Tod Williams 2004 film Door in the Floor -- the fifth of his books to be made into a movie. ~ Steve Jones, All Movie Guide

The Door in the Floor Buy this Movie	The Cider House Rules Buy this Movie	Simon Birch Buy this Movie	The Hotel New Hampshire Buy this Movie
The World According to Garp Buy this Movie

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)