John Winslow Irving (born March 2, 1942 as John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire) is a bestselling American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
His mother, Frances, and father, an Army Air Force pilot, divorced before Irving was born and at age six Irving's mother remarried. Her new husband adopted Irving, giving him the name he is known by today. Absent parents played major roles in Irving's later novels.
John Irving enjoys a rare and prominent place among contemporary American writers not only for having published a string of best-sellers but also for having received accolades from critics in the popular and academic press alike. His novels have combined 19th century traditions with modern-day melodrama, sex, and random violence.
Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setitbusng Free the Bears. The novel was reasonably well reviewed, but failed to garner much of an audience. In the late 1960's, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound Marriage, were similarly received. At around this time, in 1975, Irving accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
The World According To Garp, published in 1978 to phenomenal acclaim, firmly established him as one of the most inventive and talented novelists in America. The novel concerns the career of a novelist, and its complex narrative gives Irving the opportunity to offer his opinions on a number of contemporary issues, most notably feminism.
In addition to selling more than 120,000 hardcover copies and more than 3 million paperbacks, >The World According To Garp established Irving as an American cultural icon. In 1979 Irving won the prestigious American Book Award.
During the 1980s John Irving wrote a series of absorbing and celebrated books: The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
The Cider House Rules (1985) is a sprawling epic centered around a Maine orphanage. Its central topic is abortion, and the novel is perhaps the most obvious example of Charles Dickens' influence on Irving's writing. Irving followed it in 1989 with A Prayer for Owen Meany, another New England family epic centered around themes of religiosity. Again, the main setitbusng is a New England boarding school, and inspirations for the characters can be found in many of Irving's influences, including The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the works of Dickens.
In Owen Meany, Irving for the first time examined the consequences of the Vietnam War - particularly mandatory conscription, which Irving avoided since he was already a married father and a teacher when eligible for the draft.
More recent novels include the complex bestseller A Son of the Circus, the dark and funny novel A Widow for One Year and The Fourth Hand, a black comedy that was another popular success.
Several of Irving's books and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire where Irving grew up as the son ("fac brat") of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). (Both Irving and Bissell, and other members of the Exeter community, appear somewhat disguised in many of his novels.)
Since the publication of The World According To Garp, Irving's novels have been adapted into four motion pictures, including The Cider House Rules (1999). The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000.
He published in 1998 A Widow for One Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.
The Fourth Hand, was published in 2001; savaged by critics, it nevertheless became a bestseller. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, a children's story originally included in A Widow for One Year, was published as a book with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann in 2004. Irving's most recent novel, entitled 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 contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he has 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.
In addition to his novels, he has also published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, 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 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Vermont and Toronto.
