John Irving

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; the couple separated during pregnancy. 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.

Irving never met his biological father, who was a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II. In July 1943, 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.

Career

Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968). The novel was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied under Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

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) and its first paperback edition won the Award the next year. 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.

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).

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.

In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). Irving's next novel was A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, Ontario. The novel was influenced by The Tin Drum (1959) by Günter Grass, and the plot contains further allusions to The Scarlet Letter (1850) 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 because he was a married father when of age for the draft. Owen Meany became Irving's best selling book since Garp.

Other projects

Before the publication of Garp, Irving 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.

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. 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).

In 2005, Irving received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In a New York Magazine interview in 2009, Irving stated that he had begun work on his 13th novel inspired by Shakespeare's Richard II. Simon & Schuster In One Person (2012), taking over from Random House. In One Person is a first-person narrative. He uses the same perspective in A Prayer for Owen Meany. He also used first person in Until I Find You but changed it to third person less than a year before publication. 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.

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.

Works

Novels

Setting Free the Bears (Random House, 1968) ISBN 0-345-21812-4

The Water-Method Man (Random House, 1972) ISBN 0-394-47332-9

The 158-Pound Marriage (Random House, 1974) ISBN 0-394-48414-2

The World According to Garp (Dutton, 1978) ISBN 0-525-23770-4

The Hotel New Hampshire (Dutton, 1981) ISBN 0-525-12800-X

The Cider House Rules (William Morrow, 1985) ISBN 0-688-03036-X

A Prayer for Owen Meany (William Morrow, 1989) ISBN 0-688-07708-0

A Son of the Circus (Random House, 1994) ISBN 0-679-43496-8

A Widow for One Year (Random House, 1998) ISBN 0-375-50137-1

The Fourth Hand (Random House, 2001) ISBN 0-375-50627-6

Until I Find You (Random House, 2005) ISBN 1-4000-6383-3

Last Night in Twisted River (Random House, 2009) ISBN 1-4000-6384-1

In One Person (Simon & Schuster, 2012) ISBN 9781451664126)

Avenue of Mysteries (Simon & Schuster, 2015) ISBN 9781451664164)

The Last Chairlift (Simon & Schuster, 2022) ISBN 9781501189272

Queen Esther (Simon & Schuster, 2025) ISBN 9781501189449

Short fiction

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (Arcade Publishing, 1996) ISBN 1-55970-323-7

Other fiction

The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay (1999)

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (children's) (2004)

Nonfiction

The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995)

My Movie Business (1999)

Filmography based on writings

The World According to Garp (1982)

The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)

Simon Birch (1998) (partly based on A Prayer for Owen Meany)

The Cider House Rules (1999)

The Door in the Floor (2004) (based on A Widow for One Year)

Personal life

In 1964, Irving married Shyla Leary, whom he had met at Harvard in 1963 while taking a summer course in German, before traveling to Vienna with IES Abroad. They have two sons, Colin and Brendan. The couple divorced in the early 1980s. From 1981 to 1986, he lived in Manhattan and Water Mill, N.Y. with Rusty Unger, a writer, editor and film executive. Their letters have been donated to The NY Public Library. In 1987, he married Janet Turnbull, who had been his publisher at Bantam-Seal Books and is now one of his literary agents. They have one daughter, actor and writer Eva Everett Irving.

Irving has homes in Toronto and Pointe au Baril, Ontario. 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.

Irving was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007 and subsequently had a radical prostatectomy.

Irving is a cousin of the mother of academic Amy Bishop, who was convicted of perpetrating the 2010 University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting.

In 2018, Irving was an honorary degree recipient at Williams College.

Following the publication of his novel Queen Esther, Irving cites a visit to Israel in 1981 at the invitation of the Jerusalem International Book Fair and his meeting with a Holocaust survivor who invented a technique for growing asparagus in the desert, as a source of inspiration in his writing.

His grandchildren, Birk and Svea Irving are Olympic freestyle skiers.