John Irving

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Image:Johnirving.jpgJohn Winslow Irving (born March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Since achieving great critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978, all of Irving's novels, including well-known works The Cider House Rules and A Prayer For Owen Meany, have been best-sellers. Many of his novels have been made into movies, and Irving won the 2000 Best Adapted Screenplay Acadamy Award for his novel The Cider House Rules.

Themes in Irving's novels oftern draw upon his upbringing and personal experiences, and cover a number of topics such as New England life, feminism, religion, marriage and wrestling. Irving enjoys a wide and varied audience and is frequently cited by younger literary writers as a major influence. Irving lives in Vermont and Toronto, Ontario.


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Early Childhood

John Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire. His mother Helen, a descendant of the Winslows, one of New England's oldest and most distinguished families, divorced Irving's biological father, an airman serving in the pacific, when Irving was two years old. The family maintained a strict silence regarding his natural father. When her son was six years old, Helen Winslow married Colin F.N. Irving, a Russian History teacher at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. John Wallace Blunt, Jr. was adopted by Colin Irving and became John Winslow Irving in name. Until the 2000's, he never sought the identity of his biological father, claiming "I already have a father." In 2001, however, he discovered he had a half brother from his biological father's second marriage.

Irving attended Exeter, where he had troubles with reading and other studies (possibly due to then-undiagnosed dyslexia). Despite these difficulities, Irving became an enthusiastic reader and an avid student of literature. At Exeter he began wrestling competitively; his introduction to the sport of wrestling, he claims, taught him discipline and perseverence.<ref name="Academy of Achievement">Template:Cite web</ref>

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Studies

While a student at Exeter, Irving was mentored by famed Presbyterian theologian and novelist Frederick Buechner and writing teacher George Bennett. After graduating from Exeter Irving studied for one year at the University of Pittsburgh, and then moved to Vienna, Austria, studying at the University of Vienna and exploring Europe by motorcycle. He eventually returned to the United States, attending the University of New Hampshire and graduating in 1965. He went on to obtain an MFA from the Creative Writing program at the University of Iowa, at the time one of America's most elite graduate writing programs. There Irving studied alongside future award-winning novelists Gail Godwin, John Casey, and Donald Hendrie, Jr., and was mentored there by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He graduated in 1967.

While on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, Irving met his first wife, art student Shyla Leary. They married after Shyla became unexpectedly pregnant, and eventually had two sons, Colin and Brendan Irving, before divorcing in the mid-1980s. Irving subsequently wed his agent Janet Turnbull in 1987, with whom he has a third son.<ref name="Academy of Achievement" />

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Career

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Early Career (1970s)

After receiving his graduate degree from the University of Iowa, Irving returned to New England and took a position as Assistant Professor of English at Windham College in Vermont. There his literary career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears. The novel, which drew upon Irving's European experiences and feature two students who conspire to free the animals from a Vienna zoo, was reasonably well reviewed but failed to garner much of an audience. There was discussion of his penning a screenplay for Setting Free the Bears in collaboration with director Irving Kershner, but nothing came of the project.

Irving's second novel The Water-Method Man, (1972) also drew upon his experiences in Austria. The same year of its publication, Irving was appointed Writer-In-Residence at the University of Iowa. The influence of this academic setting is visible in Irving's next novel The 158-Pound Marriage, (1974), which focuses on the disastrous sexual exploits of two couples in an American university setting. At around the time of its publication (1975), Irving accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

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The World According to Garp (Late 1970s)

Frustrated by the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from his first publisher Random House, Irving chose to offer his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), to Dutton, which promised him a stronger marketing push. The novel is set in New England and follows its protagonist Garp through an intriguing series of plotlines and themes, ending with its oft-quoted closing line, "In the world according to Garp, we're all terminal cases." Garp became a massive international bestseller and cultural phenomenon, and was a finalist for (but did not win) the American Book Award (now the National Book Award) for hardcover fiction in 1979. In 1980 Garp received awards from the National Book Foundation for paperback and fiction. The World According to Garp, because of its domestic and international successes, transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, guaranteeing bestseller status for all of his subsequent books.

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1980's

Irving followed "Garp" with The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which was poorly received by critics but sold well. In 1982, soon after the publication of The Hotel New Hampshire publication, Garp was made into a film directed by George Roy Hill, with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close and John Lithgow in supporting roles. The movie drew several Academy Award nominations, including those of supporting actress/actor for Close and Lithgow. In the wake of Garp's success, The Hotel New Hampshire was quickly made into a film of the same name in 1984, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges.

In 1985 Irving published The Cider House Rules, a sprawling epic centered around the relationship between obstetrician/abortionist Dr. Larch, proprietor of a Maine orphanage, and the novel's protagonist, orphan Homer Wells. The novel's most prevalent theme is abortion, and this prevalence made Irving an outspoken figure on the subject during the 1980's and 1990's. Irving's literary style in The Cider House Rules is perhaps the most obvious example of the influence of Charles Dickens on his work. The influence of Dickens can also be seen in A Prayer for Owen Meany 1989, a New England family epic centered around themes of religion and fate. Owen Meany is set in a New England boarding school, and inspirations for the characters can be found in many of Irving's self-proclaimed (?) influences, including The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the works of Dickens. Owen Meany also demonstrates Irving's first examination of the consequences of the Vietnam War - particularly mandatory conscription (something Irving, as a married father and a teacher when the draft was instituted, was able to avoid). Owen Meany became Irving's best selling book after Garp and is often featured on high school English reading lists.

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1990's

In 1993 Irving published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a collection of shorter writings including a personal memoir detailing how Irving became a writer, the text of The Pension Grillparzer (a short story previously found only within The World According to Garp), and an homage to Dickens. Irving returned to Random House for his next book, A Son of the Circus (1995), about the travling-circus memories of a Canadian-dwelling East Indian doctor. Arguably his most complicated and difficult book, it was dismissed by critics but became a national bestseller on the strength of Irving's reputation. Critics more favorably received 1998's A Widow for One Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. Also in 1998 Owen Meany was adapted into a children's film, Simon Birch starring Oliver Platt and Ashley Judd (Irving disowned this adaptation, going so far as to request that all of the characters' names be changed for the film version). In 1999, ten years after The Cider House Rules was published, Irving's screenplay for the novel was made into a film directed by Lasse Hallström and 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. Michael Caine won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in his role as Dr. Larch. Irving's 2000 memoir, My Movie Business addresses the protracted process of deliving The Cider House Rules to the screen.

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21st Century

Irving's 2001 novel The Fourth Hand, about an injured photojournalist who receives the world's first hand transplant, was savaged by critics but nevertheless became a bestseller.<ref name="Academy of Achievement" /> Irving followed The Fourth Hand with 2002's The Imaginary Girlfriend, "a miniature autobiography detailing Irving’s parallel careers of writing and wrestling."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>. In 2004, six years after the publication of [[A Widow For One Year]], the novel's first third was adapted into the 2004 film The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. Irving's most recent novel Until I Find You (July 12, 2005), reenters the European arena as its actor protagonist recalls a childhood searching for his father amongst the tattoo parlors of Northern Europe. On June 28, 2005, The New York Times published an article [1] revealing that Until I Find You contains two previously undiscussed elements of Irving's life: his having been sexually abused by an older woman at age 11, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.

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Other Projects

Because he gained independent wealth from the success of "Garp", Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions such as his Writer-In-Residence stint at the University of Iowa, and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams at Northfield Mount Hermon School (where Colin was a student) and at Vermont Academy (where Brendan was a student).

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Stature

Irving's literary stature is a subject of some debate. Advocates consider him the heir to Charles Dickens, a populist who uses eccentric characters and heavy doses of comedy and pathos to gain an audience for his politically liberal social perspectives. Detractors dismiss him as an author of crude sex comedies that exploit melodramatic circumstances to manipulate readers. Both perspectives have credence: Irving's body of work is uneven, and his meandering plots and prose style do not compare well with the work of such praised contemporaries as Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion. Yet Irving enjoys a wider audience (particularly of younger readers) than all of those novelists combined, and is frequently cited by younger literary writers as a major influence.

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Literary Works

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Trivia

  • Irving held a bit role in the 1956 episode entitled The Rarest Stamp of the 1954-1956 American television series Studio 57, directed by Paul Landres<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • Irving makes a brief cameo in the film The World According to Garp as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.
  • Irving makes a cameo as a train station agent in the film version of The Cider House Rules
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    Notes

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    External links

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