John Irving - 1942
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Londonderry High School in Londonderry, New Hampshire
I. The Life of John Irving
John Irving was born John Wallace Blunt Jr. on March 2, 1942 in Exeter, New Hampshire. His parents were divorced before he was born, but his mother remarried when he was six. His birth name was changed to John Winslow Irving after his stepfather adopted him. Very similarly, a boy gets adopted by his stepfather in Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany . Irving takes many of his own life experiences and varies them in his writing.
Irving grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire. He practically lived on the campus of Philips Exeter Academy (on which he based two fictional schools) because his stepfather taught Russian History there.
Irving later attended the University of Pittsburgh and the Institute for European Studies in Vienna. Vienna, as Josie Campbell writes in John Irving: A Critical Companion, "represents violence and decadence" and is a city that a "number of characters come from, grow up in, escape from, and sometimes return to" (Campbell 2).
He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1965 and earned his MFA from the University of Iowa. Afterwards, Irving taught at Mount Holyoke College and then the Writers' Workshop in Iowa.
John Irving was exposed to many places including New Hampshire, Maine, Iowa, New York City, Vienna and Toronto. Often times, he would use his current location as a base for the setting of his current novel.
Shyla Leary married Irving in 1964 in Greece. They had two sons, Colin and Brendan, but in 1982, Shyla and Irving got divorced. He married again to Janet Turnbull, and their son, Everett, was born in 1991. They currently live in Putney, Vermont, and Toronto where Irving continues to write great works.
Irving was first inspired to become a writer after reading Great Expectations in his teens. In Saving Piggy Tweed, Irving said, "Great Expectations is the first novel I read that made me wish I had written it; it is the novel that made me want to be a novelist-specifically, to move a reader as I was moved then" (Irving 349). Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne and Hardy all contributed to the shaping of Irving's writing for he became a novelist writing in the nineteenth-century tradition. Similarities can be found in Irving's and Faulkner's writing, such as irony, absurdity and juxtaposition.
II. Works of John Irving
"
A Winter Branch" Redbook (November 1965)
Setting Free the Bears (1968)
The Water-Method Man (1972)
The 158-Pound Marriage (1973)
"Lost in New York" Esquire (March 1973)
"Students: These Are Your Teachers" Esquire (September 1973)
The World According to Garp (1976)
"Vigilance" Ploughshares (April 1977)
"Dog in the Alley, Child in the Sky" Esquire (June 1977)
Three by Irving (1980)
The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)
"A Bear Called State O'Maine" Rolling Stone (20 August 1981)
The Cider House Rules (1985)
"The Foul Ball" New Yorker (30 January 1988)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1993)
A Son of the Circus (1994)
"The Courier" New Yorker (1 August 1994)
A Widow for One Year (1998)
III. Interviews with John Irving
Bernstein, Richard. "John Irving: 19th Century Novelist for These Times." New York Times. (25 Apr. 1989): C13, C17.
De Coppet, Laura. "An Interview with John Irving." Interview . (11 Oct. 1981): 42-44.
McCaffery, Larry. "An Interview with John Irving." Contemporary Literature 23 (Winter 1982): 1-18.
Neubauer, Alexander. "John Irving." Conversations on Writing Fiction: Interviews with 13 Distinguished Teachers of Fiction Writing in America. New York: HarperCollins. (1994): 141-152.
Williams, Thomas. "Talk with John Irving." New York Times Book Review. (23 Apr. 1978): 6.
IV. How to Contact John Irving
John Irving can be reached via his publisher, Random House at
http://www.randomhouse.comIV. Bibliography Campbell, Josie P. John Irving: A Critical Companion
. Greenwood Press: Westport, Connecticut, 1998. Irving, John. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. New York: Arcade, 1993. "John Irving I Author Biography." John Irving Homepage. Random House Publishing.
1999. Online. Internet.
This essay was submitted by a student of Elizabeth H. Juster, a teacher at Londonderry High School in Londonderry, New Hampshire.
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