Five of his novels have been adapted into films (Garp, HotelNew Hampshire, Owen Meany, Cider House, and Widow for One Year). Several of Irving's books and short stories have been set in and around New England, in fictional towns resembling Exeter, New Hampshire.
Early life
Irving was born John Wallace Blunt Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (née Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt Sr., a writer and executive recruiter;[3][4] the couple separated during pregnancy.[5] Irving was raised by his mother and stepfather, Colin Franklin Newell Irving, who was a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member. His uncle Hammy Bissell was also part of the faculty. John Irving was in the Phillips Exeter wrestling program as a student athlete and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life. While a student at Exeter, Irving was taught by author and Christian theologian Frederick Buechner, whom he quoted in an epigraph in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving has dyslexia.[6][7]
Irving never met his biological father, who was a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II. In July 1943,[8] John Blunt Sr. was shot down over Burma but survived. The incident was incorporated into The Cider House Rules. Irving did not find out about his father's heroism until 1981, when he was almost 40 years old.[9]
Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from his first publisher, Random House, Irving offered his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), to Dutton, which promised him stronger commitment to marketing. The novel became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 (which ultimately went to Tim O'Brien for Going After Cacciato)[12] and its first paperback edition won the Award the next year.[13][a]Garp was later made into a film directed by George Roy Hill, starring Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo appearance in the film as the referee in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.[14]
John Irving
The World According to Garp was among three books recommended to the Pulitzer Advisory Board for consideration for the 1979 Award in Fiction in the Pulitzer Jury Committee report, although the award was given to The Stories of John Cheever (1978).[15]
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. Like Garp, the novel was quickly made into a film, this time directed by Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. "Interior Space", a short story originally published in Fiction magazine in 1980, was selected for the 1981 O. Henry Prize Stories collection.[16]
Irving returned to Random House for his next book, A Son of the Circus (1995). Arguably his most complicated and difficult book, and a departure from the themes and settings of his previous novels, it received ambivalent reviews by American critics[19] but became a national and international bestseller on the strength of Irving's reputation for fashioning literate, engrossing page-turners. Irving returned in 1998 with A Widow for One Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.[19]
In 1999, after nearly 10 years in development, Irving's screenplay for The Cider House Rules was made into a film directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Delroy Lindo. Irving also made a cameo appearance as a disapproving stationmaster. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.[20]
Irving wrote My Movie Business, a memoir about his involvement in creating the film version of The Cider House Rules. After its publication in 1999, he appeared on the CBC Television program Hot Type to promote the book. During the interview, he was asked about author Tom Wolfe "once again" proclaiming the death of the modern novel. Irving responded, "I don't read Tom Wolfe, so I didn't hear what he said." The episode then cut to a photo of Wolfe, and Irving elaborating that Wolfe "can't write" and his writing made Irving gag.[21] When asked about his statements subsequently, Irving has said he believed the Hot Type interview was over and he was speaking off the record, and that footage from the interview had been manipulated. Wolfe appeared on Hot Type later in 1999, calling Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike his "three stooges" who were panicked by his newest novel, A Man in Full (1998).
Irving's 10th book, The Fourth Hand (2001), also became a bestseller. In 2004, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, a children's picture book originally included in A Widow for One Year, was published with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann. Irving's 11th novel, Until I Find You, was released on July 12, 2005.
On June 28, 2005, The New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You (2005) contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.[1]
In his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River, published in 2009, Irving's central character is a novelist with, as critic Boyd Tonkin puts it, "a career that teasingly follows Irving's own."[18]
Irving has had four novels reach number one on the bestseller list of The New York Times: The Hotel New Hampshire (September 27, 1981), which stayed number one for seven weeks, and was in the top 15 for over 27 weeks; The Cider House Rules (June 16, 1985); A Widow for One Year (June 14, 1998); and The Fourth Hand (July 29, 2001).
Other projects
Irving in the Netherlands (1989)
Before the publication of Garp made him independently wealthy, Irving sporadically accepted short-term teaching positions (including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop). He also served as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams until he was 47 years old. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as an Outstanding American in 1992.[22][23]
In addition to his novels, he has also published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings including a brief memoir and unpublished short fiction, My Movie Business, an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen, and The Imaginary Girlfriend, a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling. In 2000, Irving revealed that he and Tod "Kip" Williams were co-writing a screenplay for an adaptation of the novel A Widow for One Year (1998). This adaptation became The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, released in 2004, directed by Williams.
In 2002, his four most highly regarded novels, The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year, were published in Modern Library editions.[24]Owen Meany was adapted into the 1998 film Simon Birch (Irving required that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay's story was "markedly different" from that of the novel; Irving is on record as having enjoyed the film, however[25]).
In a New York Magazine interview in 2009, Irving stated that he had begun work on a new novel, his 13th, based in part on a speech from Shakespeare's Richard II.Simon & Schuster published the novel, titled In One Person (2012), taking over from Random House. In One Person has a first-person viewpoint, Irving's first such narrative since A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving decided to change the first-person perspective of Until I Find You to third person less than a year before publication).[1]In One Person features a 60-year-old, bisexual protagonist named William, looking back on his life in the 1950s and '60s. The novel shares a similar theme and concern with The World According to Garp, the latter being in part about "people who hate you for your sexual differences," said Irving.[29]
He won a Lambda Literary Award in 2013 in the Bisexual Fiction category for In One Person, and was also awarded the organization's Bridge Builder Award to honor him as an ally of the LGBT community.[30]
On June 10, 2013, Irving announced his next novel, his 14th, titled Avenue of Mysteries, named after a street in Mexico City.[31] In an interview the previous year, he had revealed the last line of the book: "Not every collision course comes as a surprise."[32]
On December 19, 2014, Irving posted a message on the Facebook page devoted to him and his work that he had "finished 'Avenue of Mysteries.' It is a shorter novel for me, comparable in length to 'In One Person.'"[33] Simon & Schuster published the book in November, 2015.[34]
On November 3, 2015, Irving revealed that he'd been approached by HBO and Warner Brothers to reconstruct The World According to Garp as a miniseries. He described the project as being in the early stages.[35] According to the byline of a self-penned, February 20, 2017, essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Irving had completed his teleplay for the five-part series based on The World According to Garp and was working on his fifteenth novel.
On June 28, 2017, Irving revealed in a long letter to fans on Facebook that his new novel was primarily a ghost story.[36] "...I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel, my fifteenth, the ghosts are more prominent than before; the novel begins and ends with them. Like A Widow for One Year, this novel is constructed as a play in three acts. I'm calling Act I 'Early Signs.' I began writing it on New Year's Eve—not a bad night to start a ghost story."
In an interview with Mike Kilen for The Des Moines Register, published on October 26, 2017, Irving revealed that the title of his novel-in-progress was "Darkness As a Bride."[37] The title was taken from Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure: "If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, / and hug it in mine arms." He later changed the title to The Last ChairliftArchived February 29, 2024, at the Wayback Machine. The novel was published by Simon & Schuster in October 2022.
Irving received the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award at the annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize gala on October 28, 2018.[38]
In 1964, Irving married Shyla Leary,[40] whom he had met at Harvard in 1963 while taking a summer course in German, before traveling to Vienna with IES Abroad.[41] They have two sons, Colin and Brendan.[42] The couple divorced in the early 1980s.[43] In 1987, he married Janet Turnbull, who had been his publisher at Bantam-Seal Books[43][44] and is now one of his literary agents.[45] They have a daughter, Eva Everett, born in 1991.[43][46] In 2015, Eva came out as a trans woman.[47]
Irving has homes in Toronto and Pointe au Baril, Ontario.[44] On December 13, 2019, Irving became a Canadian citizen. He has said he plans to keep his U.S. citizenship, reserving the right to be outspoken about the United States and his dislike of Donald Trump, whom he referred to as vulgar, narcissistic, and xenophobic.[48]
^Nicholas Wroe (August 13, 2005). "Grappling with life". The Observer. London. Retrieved November 5, 2009. his parents had married six months before his birth
^"National Book Awards – 1980"Archived April 26, 2020, at the Wayback Machine. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-14. (With essays by Deb Caletti and Craig Nova from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
^Solomon, Even (December 17, 1999). "John Irving's movie business". Hot Type. Toronto: CBC Archives. Archived from the original on April 17, 2023. Retrieved March 6, 2024.
^"2005 Summit Highlights Photo". 2005. Archived from the original on January 19, 2021. Retrieved December 27, 2020. Author John Irving with Dr. Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and a Nobel Prize laureate.
^Rita Braver (October 23, 2022). "John Irving: A writer's life". CBS Sunday Morning. Archived from the original on February 18, 2024. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
^Dundas, Deborah (December 13, 2019). "'Ending up here is a love story.' American writer John Irving becomes a Canadian citizen". Toronto Star. Archived from the original on December 14, 2019. Retrieved December 13, 2019. He reserves the right to continue to be outspoken about the United States. He reserves the right to criticize. "I very much intend to keep my American citizenship. ... He is vocal, very vocal, about his dislike of Trump ("his vulgarity, his narcissism ... his xenophobia").
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