Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Characters Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Author Biography
The son of farmer John Champlin Gardner and his wife Priscilla Jones Gardner, John Gardner was born on July 21, 1933, and grew up on a farm. His mother had been an English teacher, and his father, like the father in “Redemption” was an avid reader of poetry, Shakespeare, and the Bible. As a result, Gardner was exposed to a myriad of literature and popular culture during his childhood. When Gardner was in early adolescence, he was responsible for the accidental death of his brother, Gilbert, who was crushed beneath a cultipacker young Gardner was driving home. The tragedy became an important motivation for Gardner’s writing in later years.
After graduating from high school, Gardner attended De Pauw University. When he was nineteen, he married Joan Patterson. Gardner finished his undergraduate career at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955, before earning an M.A. and a Ph. D. at the State University of Iowa. In addition to creative writing, Gardner studied medieval literature. After completing his Ph.D., Gardner taught at a number of colleges and universities. From 1959 to 1962, he taught at Chico State University in California; one of his students during this time was Raymond Carver, the short story writer.
Starting in the mid-1960s, Gardner published an enormous number of works, including critical essays, a biography of Chaucer, medieval studies, novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. In 1971, he published Grendel, the story of Beowulf told by the monster. In Gardner’s version, the monster is depicted as an existentialist philosopher. In 1977, the year he first published “Redemption” , he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for October Light. During the same year he published The Poetry of Chaucer as well as The Life and Times of Chaucer, and underwent surgery for cancer.
In 1978, Gardner published his most controversial book, On Moral Fiction, a treatise in aesthetics and the purpose of fiction. He also married his second wife, Liz Rosenberg, whom he divorced in 1982. During the next few years following 1978, he traveled the country, debating the ideas introduced in the book. In 1981, he published a collection of short stories titled The Art of Living and Other Stories. The book includes the short story “Redemption.”
In 1982, John Gardner died in a motorcycle accident, days before his planned marriage to Susan Thornton. The manuscripts he was working on at the time of his death were published in 1986 as Stillness and Shadows.
