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Book Home  Books Information John Winslow Irving
John Winslow Irving
John Winslow Irving (born March 2, 1942) is an American
novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (for The Cider House
Rules, based on his book of the same name).
Birth and youth
Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in unusually contradictory
circumstances that have since fueled the plots and themes of several
of his novels: his mother Helen, a descendant of the Winslows, one
of New England's oldest and most distinguished families, gave birth
to Irving (his birth name was John Winslow) out of wedlock, refusing
to expose her child's anonymous father. Helen Winslow later married
Colin F.N. Irving, a teacher at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy.
John Winslow became John Irving, taking his adoptive father's name.
Until the mid 2000s, he never sought the identity of his biological
father—"I already have a father," he said. In 2001
he discovered he had a half brother from his biological father's second
marriage.
Irving attended Exeter, where he was a mediocre student
due to then-undiagnosed dyslexia, but was an outstanding wrestler.
The trials of pre-sexual revolution single-motherhood, wrestling,
and New England academic life feature prominently in Irving's novels,
particularly The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany.
The primary settings for both novels are based on Phillips Exeter
Academy.
Irving lost his virginity at age 11 to an older woman.
This event inspired his 2005 novel Until I Find You.
Studies
While a student at Exeter, Irving was mentored by famed Presbyterian
theologian and novelist Frederick Buechner and writing teacher George
Bennett, who later helped Irving gain admission to the Iowa Writer's
Workshop, America's most elite graduate writing program, then the
only one of its kind. Irving briefly studied at the University of
Pittsburgh and eventually graduated from the University of New Hampshire.
At Iowa, Irving studied alongside future award-winning novelists Gail
Godwin, John Casey, and Donald Hendrie, Jr., among others. He was
mentored there by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
While on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, Irving met
his first wife, Shyla Leary, an art student. They married after Shyla
became unexpectedly pregnant, and eventually had two sons before divorcing
in the mid-1980s. Irving subsequently wed his agent, Janet Turnbull,
with whom he has a third son.
Career
Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his
first novel, Setting Free the Bears. The novel was reasonably well
reviewed, but failed to garner much of an audience. His second and
third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound Marriage, were
similarly received. Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels
were garnering 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 went
on to become a massive international bestseller and cultural phenomenon,
and was a finalist for the American Book Award (now the National Book
Award) for hardcover fiction in 1979 (the award went to Tim O'Brien
for Going After Cacciato). Garp won the National Book Foundation's
award for paperback fiction the following year. Garp was later made
into a film directed by George Roy Hill and 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 in the film as an official in
one of Garp's high school wrestling matches. Irving also has a cameo
appearance in the film version of The Cider House Rules as a train
station agent.
The importance of Garp
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer
to a household name, guaranteeing bestseller status for all of his
subsequent books. He followed "Garp" with The Hotel New
Hampshire(1981), which was poorly received by critics but sold well
and, like Garp, was quickly made into a film, this time directed by
Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges.
In 1985 he published The Cider House Rules, a sprawling
epic centered around a Maine orphanage. The novel frankly explores
the controversial subject of abortion, and is perhaps the most obvious
example of the influence of Charles Dickens on Irving's work. He followed
in 1989 with A Prayer for Owen Meany, another New England family epic
centered around themes of religiousness. Again, the main setting 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 work of Dickens. For the first time, Irving examined the consequences
of the Vietnam War - particularly mandatory conscription, which Irving
avoided since he was already a married father and a teacher when the
draft was instituted. Owen Meany became Irving's bestselling book
since Garp, and is now a frequent feature on high school English reading
lists.
Irving returned to Random House for his next book, A
Son of the Circus (1995). Arguably his most complicated and difficult
book, it was dismissed by critics but became a national bestseller
on the strength of Irving's reputation for fashioning literate, engrossing
page-turners. Irving returned to better form in 1998 with 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. 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 1999, after nearly ten years in development, Irving's
screenplay for The Cider House Rules 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.
Since the publication of "Garp" made him independently
wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing
as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions
(including one at his graduate school alma mater, the Iowa Writer's
Workshop) and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school
wrestling teams. In addition to his novels, he has also published
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a collection including a brief memoir
and unpublished short fiction, and My Movie Business, an account of
the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big
screen. He divides his time between residences in Vermont, Toronto,
and New York. In recent years, his three most highly regarded novels,
The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for
Owen Meany, have been published in Modern Library editions. "Owen
Meany" was adapted into a children's film, "Simon Birch"
(Irving disowned this adaptation, going so far as to request that
all of the characters' names be changed for the film version). In
2004, A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor,
starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.
His 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 relatively plain prose style
do not compare well with the work of such praised contemporaries as
Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion; Irving,
on the other hand, enjoys a wider audience than all of those novelists
combined—particularly among younger readers—and is frequently
cited by younger literary writers, such as Robert Clark Young, as
a major influence. Arguments about Irving's merit tend to reflect
the division between those who see literature's primary value as aesthetic
and those who believe that for a work to be great it must influence
culture writ large. Regardless of the differing opinions on the critical
merit of his work, Irving is guaranteed to be one of the few American
novelists of his era who will be read and discussed for many years
to come.
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