Career
Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of Setting Free the Bears (1968), his first novel. 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 well 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 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 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 made into a film, this time directed by Tony Richardson. "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 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.
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 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.
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. Irving also made an 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.
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 proclaiming the death of the modern novel. Irving said "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 elaborated that Wolfe "can't write" and that his writing made Irving gag. When asked about his statements subsequently, Irving said he believed that 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 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 personal elements about his life that he never had discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman and the entrance in his life of his biological father's family.
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."
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).
