Donald Barthelme - (1931-1989)
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I. Biography
Donald Barthelme Jr., short story writer, novelist, editor, journalist, and teacher, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 7, 1931 to Donald and Helen Barthelme. He was the oldest of five children growing
up in Houston, Texas. As Donald Sr. was establishing himself as a well-known architect, Donald Jr. sought out on journalism at his hometown schools, St. Thomas and Lamar High School in Houston.
When Donald Jr., graduated from high school he wanted to pursue his vocation in journalism and in the fall of 1949, he enrolled at the University of Houston where he worked
and later ran the Daily Cougar. Just as Barthelme began to see his career develop in front of him, he was drafted into the Army right before he was about to graduate. However, to
his delight, while doing his service he was asked to work for an Army newspaper. When he returned about two years later, he got a job as a reporter for the Houston Post.
In the following years, Barthelme moved up and became the editor of Acta Diurna, a weekly newsletter for the University of Houston's faculty and staff. As time went on Barthelme
founded and edited a paper called the Forum at the University. As people began to see his capability, he soon was asked and agreed, to be the director of the Contemporary Arts
Museum in Houston. However, following his heart's desire he resigned one year later to become a contemporary fiction and fantasy writer.
In 1964, Donald began his journey of becoming a great writer. His first novel Snow White (1967) set the stage of his writings. Snow White, The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise
(1986) were three of his famous metaphorical novels in which he entices the reader to want to find the understanding of the title. After many years of success and awards, Donald
Barthelme had won while residing in New York, he decided to return home to Houston in 1980. After settling down, Barthelme found that he had throat cancer.
In 1989 Donald Barthelme Jr., died on July 23 at the age of 58. He left behind him 4 wives (Donald had married four times), one daughter, and a great number of mourners who had loved and respected his writings and stories.
II. Literary Works Donald Barthelme began writing his books in volumes. Barthelme incorporates advertising
slogans, comic-book captions, catalogue descriptions, and jacket blurbs from records and books into a style that features verbal puns, non-sequiturs, and fracture dialogues and
narratives. Donald Jr. was quickly praised for his inventiveness and technical skill, which was well shown in Guilty Pleasures and Amateurs. Guilty Pleasures contains
miscellaneous parodies and a satirical piece while Amateurs includes many short stories from the 1970s. Snow White, Barthelme's first novel was a dark comic and erotic parody of the popular fairy tale.
Snow White has commonly been interpreted as an examination of the failure of language and the inability of literature to transcend or transform contemporary reality. The Dead Father
is often considered one of Donald's most sustained and cohesive narrative works, while in Paradise he uses spare, formalistic prose marked by
both a sense of playfulness and sorrow to create a male fantasy that is simultaneously funny, disturbing, and deeply moving. III. Awards Guggenheim fellowship, 1966 IV. Barthelme's Influences and Motives
Donald Barthelme felt his genealogical decent from a select few traditional writers: Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shady, the stories of
Heinrich von Kleist, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuhet and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. Donald Barthelme was an original and influential American writer of short
fiction. In many of his stories, Barthelme concentrated on a single bit of cultural junk and speculated on its range of implications. But even in his best stories Sam Kent commented
in his article "Contemporary vs. postmodern," "he was always in fear of danger of being engulfed by the cultural dreck--second-hand language, second-hand beliefs, second-hand
emotions--he took as his subject so that his work sometimes appeared to be a symptom of cultural malaise rather than a response to it." V. Remarks and Criticism
'Antinovelist', 'mimimalist', 'metafictionist', and 'perhaps the final post-Enlightenment writer', are just a few of the many names Donald Barthelme Jr., was given for his contemporary
fiction. Richard Gilman commented in The Confusion of Realms that Barthelme was "one of a handful of American writers who are working to replenish and extend the art of fiction
instead of trying to add to the stock of entertainment's, visions and human documents that fiction keeps piling up." Lois Gordon elaborated that idea in her book Donald Barthelme, that he "rejects traditional
chronology, plot, character, time, space, grammar, syntax, metaphor, and simile, as well as the traditional distinctions between fact and fiction. What used to organize reality--time,
space, and the structure of language--is now often disjointed, and language, and the difficulties in using it, becomes the very subject of his art. Most obvious is....its refusal to
be orderly reflection of, and comment upon, a stable, external world." Herbert Mitgang, a writer for the New York Times, called him "among the leading innovative writers of modern fiction."
As Charles Molesworth writes, "For Barthelme the success is not if the story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works." Overall Donald Barthelme Jr. has enjoyed
widespread critical acclaim and is particularly praised as a stylist who offers vital and regenerative qualities to literature. VI. Barthelme's Works Come Back, Dr. Caligari (short stories) 1964 The Teachings of Don B.: The Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of
Donald Barthelme (satire, fables, short stories, and dramas) 1992 \Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (essays) 1997 VII. Sources
Gordon, Lois. Donald Barthleme. Boston: Twayne, (New York), 1981.
Time magazine's Best Books of the Year list, 1971, for City Life
National Book Award for children's literature, 1972, for The Slightly Irregular
Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn
Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the national Institute of Arts and Letters,1972
Jesse H Jones Award from the institute of Letters, 1976, for The Dead Father
Nominated for National Books Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Los Angeles Times Book Prize, all for Sixty Stories, all in 1982
Snow White (novel) 1967
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (short stories) 1968
City Life (short stories) 1970
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn
(juvenilia) 1971
Sadness (short stories) 1972
Guilty Pleasures (satire) 1974
The Dead Father (novel) 1975
Amateurs (short stories0 1976
Sixty Stories (short stories) 1981
Overnight to Many Distant Cities (short stories) 1983
Paradise (novel) 1986
Sam's Bar (novel) 1987
Forty Stories (short stories) 1987
The King (novel) 1990
Gilman, Richard, The Confusion of Realms, Random House (New York City), 1969.
Wagner-Martin, Linda and Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme Instructor Guide, (University of Missouri), 1986.
Barth, John. Thinking Man's Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme. (The New York Times Book Review), September 3, 1989. Jessamyn. Barthelme Biography Information. (Donald Barthelme's Barthelmismo Webpage) 1990
Moore, Heather and Bean, Andrea. Donald Barthelme Papers. (University of Houston Libraries) 1993.
http://info.lib.uh.edu/speccoll/guides/barthelm.htm
Zeidner, Lisa. The Way of Don B. (University of Houston) 1990.
http://www.eskimo.com/~jessamyn/barth/nytbr.html
This essay was submitted by a student of Cheryl Petersohn, a teacher at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.