The World According to Garp (Author Biography)

Author Biography

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on March 2, 1942. Although Irving has said that The World According to Garp is not autobiographical, there are many similarities between the novelist and the title character. Irving, like Garp, has never met his biological father. (However, Irving's mother gave him some letters his father had written during World War II and he used his father's experiences for a character in The Cider House Rules. "Being a novelist," Irving once said, "is never throwing anything away.") Irving also grew up at a prep school, Exeter Academy, where his stepfather taught Russian history. He eventually attended the school himself and there acquired his lifelong interests of wrestling and writing. He was an average student, but he later discovered that one of the reasons he struggled was because he was dyslexic.

Irving was disenchanted during his brief time as a student at both the University of Pittsburgh (1961) and the University of New Hampshire (1962). He traveled to Austria in 1963 to attend the University of Vienna and the decision profoundly affected him. He lived in Vienna off and on through much of the 1960s, and the city's influence is seen in his fiction. He also married painter Shyla Leary while he was in Austria. He became the father to two boys, Colin and Brendan. He earned his M. F. A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1967 where Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was one of his mentors. In 1969, he stayed with director Irvin Kershner in a castle built by Charlemagne while they vainly worked on an unproduced screen adaptation of Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1969). His next two novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158 — Pound Marriage (1974) didn't share his first book's modest success. During this period, Irving was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1971 – 1972), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1974 – 75), and a Guggenheim fellowship (1976 – 77).

The publication of his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, changed everything for him. Irving left publishing giant Random House for E. P. Dutton because he was unsatisfied with the publicity for his second and third novels. Garp was a huge critical and popular success. The novel was nominated for a National Book Award in 1979 and won an American Book Award in 1980. The book was made into a moderately received film version starring Robin Williams as Garp.

All of Irving's novels since Garp have been critically acclaimed bestsellers, including The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer For Owen Meany (1989), Son of the Circus (1994), and A Widow For One Year (1998). Irving has been both an English professor and wrestling coach through the years. A collection of his fiction and some essays, Trying to Save Peggy Sneed, was published in 1996. Two volumes of his memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend (1996) and My Movie Business (1999), have also been published. Since The World According to Garp was adapted to film in 1982, film versions of two of his other novels have been made: The Hotel New Hampshire in 1984 and The Cider House Rules in 1999. Irving won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules (Michael Caine won the Best Supporting Actor award for his portrayal of Dr. Larch). Irving divorced his first wife in 1981. He remarried in 1987 his Canadian agent, Janet Turnbull. He currently lives with Turnbull and their son, Everett, in southern Vermont.